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Hide and Seek

by Wilkie Collins · English · Gutenberg #7893 · 910,988 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Hide and Seek

Author: Wilkie Collins


        
Release date: April 1, 2005 [eBook #7893]
                Most recently updated: March 5, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7893

Credits: Produced by James Rusk, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HIDE AND SEEK ***




Produced by James Rusk





HIDE AND SEEK

By Wilkie Collins






TO

CHARLES DICKENS,

THIS STORY IS INSCRIBED,

AS A

TOKEN OF ADMIRATION AND AFFECTION,

BY HIS FRIEND,

THE AUTHOR.




PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION

This novel ranks the third, in order of succession, of the works of
fiction which I have produced. The history of its reception, on its
first appearance, is soon told.

Unfortunately for me, “Hide And Seek” was originally published in the
year eighteen hundred and fifty-four, at the outbreak of the Crimean
War. All England felt the absorbing interest of watching that serious
national event; and new books--some of them books of far higher
pretensions than mine--found the minds of readers in general
pre-occupied or indifferent. My own little venture in fiction
necessarily felt the adverse influence of the time. The demand among
the booksellers was just large enough to exhaust the first edition, and
there the sale of this novel, in its original form, terminated.

Since that period, the book has been, in the technical phrase, “out
of print.” Proposals have reached me, at various times, for its
republication; but I have resolutely abstained from availing myself of
them for two reasons.

In the first place, I was anxious to wait until “Hide And Seek” could
make its re-appearance on a footing of perfect equality with my other
works. In the second place, I was resolved to keep it back until it
might obtain the advantage of a careful revisal, guided by the light of
the author’s later experience. The period for the accomplishment of
both these objects has now presented itself. “Hide And Seek,” in this
edition, forms one among the uniform series of my novels, which has
begun with “Antonina,” “The Dead Secret,” and “The Woman In White;”
 and which will be continued with “Basil,” and “The Queen Of Hearts.”
 My project of revisal has, at the same time, been carefully and rigidly
executed. I have abridged, and in many cases omitted, several passages
in the first edition, which made larger demands upon the reader’s
patience than I should now think it desirable to venture on if I were
writing a new book; and I have, in one important respect, so altered the
termination of the story as to make it, I hope, more satisfactory and
more complete than it was in its original form.

With such advantages, therefore, as my diligent revision can give it,
“Hide And Seek” now appeals, after an interval of seven years, for
another hearing. I cannot think it becoming--especially in this age of
universal self-assertion--to state the grounds on which I believe my
book to be worthy of gaining more attention than it obtained, through
accidental circumstances, when it was first published. Neither can I
consent to shelter myself under the favorable opinions which many of my
brother writers--and notably, the great writer to whom “Hide And Seek”
 is dedicated--expressed of these pages when I originally wrote them. I
leave it to the reader to compare this novel--especially in reference
to the conception and delineation of character--with the two novels
(“Antonina” and “Basil”) which preceded it; and then to decide whether
my third attempt in fiction, with all its faults, was, or was not, an
advance in Art on my earlier efforts. This is all the favor I ask for a
work which I once wrote with anxious care--which I have since corrected
with no sparing hand--which I have now finally dismissed to take its
second journey through the world of letters as usefully and prosperously
as it can.

HARLEY STREET, LONDON, SEPTEMBER, 1861.




OPENING CHAPTER. A CHILD’S SUNDAY.

At a quarter to one o’clock, on a wet Sunday afternoon, in November
1837, Samuel Snoxell, page to Mr. Zachary Thorpe, of Baregrove Square,
London, left the area gate with three umbrellas under his arm, to meet
his master and mistress at the church door, on the conclusion of
morning service. Snoxell had been specially directed by the housemaid
to distribute his three umbrellas in the following manner: the new silk
umbrella was to be given to Mr. and Mrs. Thorpe; the old silk umbrella
was to be handed to Mr. Goodworth, Mrs. Thorpe’s father; and the heavy
gingham was to be kept by Snoxell himself, for the special protection
of “Master Zack,” aged six years, and the only child of Mr. Thorpe.
Furnished with these instructions, the page set forth on his way to the
church.

The morning had been fine for November; but before midday the clouds had
gathered, the rain had begun, and the inveterate fog of the season had
closed dingily over the wet streets, far and near. The garden in the
middle of Baregrove Square--with its close-cut turf, its vacant beds,
its bran-new rustic seats, its withered young trees that had not yet
grown as high as the railings around them--seemed to be absolutely
rotting away in yellow mist and softly-steady rain, and was deserted
even by the cats. All blinds were drawn down for the most part over all
windows; what light came from the sky came like light seen through
dusty glass; the grim brown hue of the brick houses looked more
dirtily mournful than ever; the smoke from the chimney-pots was lost
mysteriously in deepening superincumbent fog; the muddy gutters gurgled;
the heavy rain-drops dripped into empty areas audibly. No object great
or small, no out-of-door litter whatever appeared anywhere, to break
the dismal uniformity of line and substance in the perspective of
the square. No living being moved over the watery pavement, save the
solitary Snoxell. He plodded on into a Crescent, and still the awful
Sunday solitude spread grimly humid all around him. He next entered a
street with some closed shops in it; and here, at last, some
consoling signs of human life attracted his attention. He now saw the
crossing-sweeper of the district (off duty till church came out) smoking
a pipe under the covered way that led to a mews. He detected, through
half closed shutters, a chemist’s apprentice yawing over a large book.
He passed a navigator, an ostler, and two costermongers wandering
wearily backwards and forwards before a closed public-house door. He
heard the heavy _clop clop_ of thickly-booted feet advancing behind him,
and a stern voice growling, “Now then! be off with you, or you’ll get
locked up!”--and, looking round, saw an orange-girl, guilty of having
obstructed an empty pavement by sitting on the curb-stone, driven along
before a policeman, who was followed admiringly by a ragged boy gnawing
a piece of orange-peel. Having delayed a moment to watch this Sunday
procession of three with melancholy curiosity as it moved by him,
Snoxell was about to turn the corner of a street which led directly to
the church, when a shrill series of cries in a child’s voice struck on
his ear and stopped his progress immediately.

The page stood stock-still in astonishment for an instant--then pulled
the new silk umbrella from under his arm, and turned the corner in a
violent hurry. His suspicions had not deceived him. There was Mr. Thorpe
himself walking sternly homeward through the rain, before church was
over. He led by the hand “Master Zack,” who was trotting along under
protest, with his hat half off his head, hanging as far back from his
father’s side as he possibly could, and howling all the time at the
utmost pitch of a very powerful pair of lungs.

Mr. Thorpe stopped as he passed the page, and snatched the umbrella out
of Snoxell’s hand, with unaccustomed impetuity; said sharply, “Go to
your mistress, go on to the church;” and then resumed his road home,
dragging his son after him faster than ever.

“Snoxy! Snoxy!” screamed Master Zack, turning round towards the page, so
that he tripped himself up and fell against his father’s legs at every
third step; “I’ve been a naughty boy at church!”

“Ah! you look like it, you do,” muttered Snoxell to himself
sarcastically, as he went on. With that expression of opinion, the
page approached the church portico, and waited sulkily among his fellow
servants and their umbrellas for the congregation to come out.

When Mr. Goodworth and Mrs. Thorpe left the church, the old gentleman,
regardless of appearances, seized eagerly on the despised gingham
umbrella, because it was the largest he could get, and took his daughter
home under it in triumph. Mrs. Thorpe was very silent, and sighed
dolefully once or twice, when her father’s attention wandered from her
to the people passing along the street.

“You’re fretting about Zack,” said the old gentleman, looking round
suddenly at his daughter. “Never mind! leave it to me. I’ll undertake to
beg him off this time.”

“It’s very disheartening and shocking to find him behaving so,” said
Mrs. Thorpe, “after the careful way we’ve brought him up in, too!”

“Nonsense, my love! No, I don’t mean that--I beg your pardon. But who
can be surprised that a child of six years old should be tired of a
sermon forty minutes long by my watch? I was tired of it myself I know,
though I wasn’t candid enough to show it as the boy did. There! there!
we won’t begin to argue: I’ll beg Zack off this time, and we’ll say no
more about it.”

Mr. Goodworth’s announcement of his benevolent intentions towards Zack
seemed to have very little effect on Mrs. Thorpe; but she said nothing
on that subject or any other during the rest of the dreary walk home,
through rain, fog, and mud, to Baregrove Square.

Rooms have their mysterious peculiarities of physiognomy as well as men.
There are plenty of rooms, all of much the same size, all furnished
in much the same manner, which, nevertheless, differ completely
in expression (if such a term may be allowed) one from the other;
reflecting the various characters of their inhabitants by such fine
varieties of effect in the furniture-features generally common to all,
as are often, like the infinitesimal varieties of eyes, noses, and
mouths, too intricately minute to be traceable. Now, the parlor of Mr.
Thorpe’s house was neat, clean, comfortably and sensibly furnished.
It was of the average size. It had the usual side-board, dining-table,
looking-glass, scroll fender, marble chimney-piece with a clock on it,
carpet with a drugget over it, and wire window-blinds to keep people
from looking in, characteristic of all respectable London parlors of the
middle class. And yet it was an inveterately severe-looking room--a room
that seemed as if it had never been convivial, never uproarious,
never anything but sternly comfortable and serenely dull--a room which
appeared to be as unconscious of acts of mercy, and easy unreasoning
over-affectionate forgiveness to offenders of any kind--juvenile or
otherwise--as if it had been a cell in Newgate, or a private torturing
chamber in the Inquisition. Perhaps Mr. Goodworth felt thus affected
by the parlor (especially in November weather) as soon as he entered
it--for, although he had promised to beg Zack off, although Mr. Thorpe
was sitting alone by the table and accessible to petitions, with a book
in his hand, the old gentleman hesitated uneasily for a minute or two,
and suffered his daughter to speak first.

“Where is Zack?” asked Mrs. Thorpe, glancing quickly and nervously all
round her.

“He is locked up in my dressing-room,” answered her husband without
taking his eyes off the book.

“In your dressing-room!” echoed Mrs. Thorpe, looking as startled and
horrified as if she had received a blow instead of an answer; “in your
dressing-room! Good heavens, Zachary! how do you know the child hasn’t
got at your razors?”

“They are locked up,” rejoined Mr. Thorpe, with the mildest reproof in
his voice, and the mournfullest self-possession in his manner. “I took
care before I left the boy, that he should get at nothing which could do
him any injury. He is locked up, and will remain locked up, because”--

“I say, Thorpe! won’t you let him off this time?” interrupted Mr.
Goodworth, boldly plunging head foremost, with his petition for mercy,
into the conversation.

“If you had allowed me to proceed, sir,” said Mr. Thorpe, who always
called his father-in-law _Sir,_ “I should have simply remarked that,
after having enlarged to my son (in such terms, you will observe, as I
thought best fitted to his comprehension) on the disgrace to his parents
and himself of his behavior this morning, I set him as a task three
verses to learn out of the ‘Select Bible Texts for Children;’ choosing
the verses which seemed most likely, if I may trust my own judgment
on the point, to impress on him what his behavior ought to be for the
future in church. He flatly refused to learn what I told him. It was, of
course, quite impossible to allow my authority to be set at defiance by
my own child (whose disobedient disposition has always, God knows, been
a source of constant trouble and anxiety to me); so I locked him up, and
locked up he will remain until he has obeyed me. My dear,” (turning to
his wife and handing her a key), “I have no objection, if you wish, to
your going and trying what _you_ can do towards overcoming the obstinacy
of this unhappy child.”

Mrs. Thorpe took the key, and went up stairs immediately--went up to do
what all women have done, from the time of the first mother; to do
what Eve did when Cain was wayward in his infancy, and cried at her
breast--in short, went up to coax her child.

Mr. Thorpe, when his wife closed the door, carefully looked down
the open page on his knee for the place where he had left off--found
it--referred back a moment to the last lines of the preceding leaf--and
then went on with his book, not taking the smallest notice of Mr.
Goodworth.

“Thorpe!” cried the old gentleman, plunging head-foremost again, into
his son-in-law’s reading this time instead of his talk, “You may say
what you please; but your notion of bringing up Zack is a wrong one
altogether.”

With the calmest imaginable expression of face, Mr. Thorpe looked up
from his book; and, first carefully putting a paper-knife between the
leaves, placed it on the table. He then crossed one of his legs over the
other, rested an elbow on each arm of his chair, and clasped his
hands in front of him. On the wall opposite hung several
lithographed portraits of distinguished preachers, in and out of the
Establishment--mostly represented as very sturdily-constructed men with
bristly hair, fronting the spectator interrogatively and holding thick
books in their hands. Upon one of these portraits--the name of the
original of which was stated at the foot of the print to be the Reverend
Aaron Yollop--Mr. Thorpe now fixed his eyes, with a faint approach to
a smile on his face (he never was known to laugh), and with a look and
manner which said as plainly as if he had spoken it: “This old man is
about to say something improper or absurd to me; but he is my wife’s
father, it is my duty to bear with him, and therefore I am perfectly
resigned.”

“It’s no use looking in that way, Thorpe,” growled the old gentleman;
“I’m not to be put down by looks at my time of life. I may have my own
opinions I suppose, like other people; and I don’t see why I shouldn’t
express them, especially when they relate to my own daughter’s boy. It’s
very unreasonable of me, I dare say, but I think I ought to have a voice
now and then in Zack’s bringing up.”

Mr. Thorpe bowed respectfully--partly to Mr. Goodworth, partly to the
Reverend Aaron Yollop. “I shall always be happy, sir, to listen to any
expression of your opinion--”

“My opinion’s this,” burst out Mr. Goodworth. “You’ve no business to
take Zack to church at all, till he’s some years older than he is now.
I don’t deny that there may be a few children, here and there, at six
years old, who are so very patient, and so very--(what’s the word for
a child that knows a deal more than he has any business to know at his
age? Stop! I’ve got it!--_precocious_--that’s the word)--so very patient
and so very precocious that they will sit quiet in the same place for
two hours; making believe all the time that they understand every word
of the service, whether they really do or not. I don’t deny that there
may be such children, though I never met with them myself, and should
think them all impudent little hypocrites if I did! But Zack isn’t one
of that sort: Zack’s a genuine child (God bless him)! Zack--”

“Do I understand you, my dear sir,” interposed Mr. Thorpe, sorrowfully
sarcastic, “to be praising the conduct of my son in disturbing the
congregation, and obliging me to take him out of church?”

“Nothing of the sort,” retorted the old gentleman; “I’m not praising
Zack’s conduct, but I _am_ blaming yours. Here it is in plain
words:--_You_ keep on cramming church down his throat; and _he_ keeps on
puking at it as if it was physic, because he don’t know any better,
and can’t know any better at his age. Is that the way to make him take
kindly to religious teaching? I know as well as you do, that he roared
like a young Turk at the sermon. And pray what was the subject of the
sermon? Justification by Faith. Do you mean to tell me that he, or any
other child at his time of life, could understand anything of such a
subject as that; or get an atom of good out of it? You can’t--you know
you can’t! I say again, it’s no use taking him to church yet; and what’s
more, it’s worse than no use, for you only associate his first ideas
of religious instruction with everything in the way of restraint and
discipline and punishment that can be most irksome to him. There! that’s
my opinion, and I should like to hear what you’ve got to say against
it?”

“Latitudinarianism,” said Mr. Thorpe, looking and speaking straight at
the portrait of the Reverend Aaron Yollop.

“You can’t fob me off with long words, which I don’t understand, and
which I don’t believe you can find in Johnson’s Dictionary,” continued
Mr. Goodworth doggedly. “You would do much better to take my advice, and
let Zack go to church, for the present, at his mother’s knees. Let his
Morning Service be about ten minutes long; let your wife tell him, out
of the New Testament, about Our Savior’s goodness and gentleness to
little children; and then let her teach him, from the Sermon on the
Mount, to be loving and truthful and forbearing and forgiving, for Our
Savior’s sake. If such precepts as those are enforced--as they may be
in one way or another--by examples drawn from his own daily life; from
people around him; from what he meets with and notices and asks about,
out of doors and in--mark my words, he’ll take kindly to his religious
instruction. I’ve seen that in other children: I’ve seen it in my own
children, who were all brought up so. Of course, you don’t agree with
me! Of course you’ve got another objection all ready to bowl me down
with?”

“Rationalism,” said Mr. Thorpe, still looking steadily at the
lithographed portrait of the Reverend Aaron Yollop.

“Well, your objection’s a short one this time at any rate; and that’s a
blessing!” said the old gentleman rather irritably. “Rationalism--eh? I
understand that _ism,_ I rather suspect, better than the other. It
means in plain English, that you think I’m wrong in only wanting to give
religious instruction the same chance with Zack which you let all other
kinds of instruction have--the chance of becoming useful by being first
made attractive. You can’t get him to learn to read by telling him
that it will improve his mind--but you can by getting him to look at a
picture book. You can’t get him to drink senna and salts by reasoning
with him about its doing him good--but you can by promising him a lump
of sugar to take after it. You admit this sort of principle so far,
because you’re obliged; but the moment anybody wants (in a spirit of
perfect reverence and desire to do good) to extend it to higher things,
you purse up your lips, shake your head, and talk about Rationalism--as
if that was an answer! Well! well! it’s no use talking--go your own
way--I wash my hands of the business altogether. But now I _am_ at
it I’ll just say this one thing more before I’ve done:--your way of
punishing the boy for his behavior in church is, in my opinion, about as
bad and dangerous a one as could possibly be devised. Why not give him
a thrashing, if you _must_ punish the miserable little urchin for
what’s his misfortune as much as his fault? Why not stop his pudding, or
something of that sort? Here you are associating verses in the Bible, in
his mind, with the idea of punishment and being locked up in the cold!
You may make him get his text by heart, I dare say, by fairly tiring him
out; but I tell you what I’m afraid you’ll make him learn too, if you
don’t mind--you’ll make him learn to dislike the Bible as much as other
boys dislike the birch-rod!”

“Sir,” cried Mr. Thorpe, turning suddenly round, and severely
confronting Mr. Goodworth, “once for all, I must most respectfully
insist on being spared for the future any open profanities in
conversation, even from your lips. All my regard and affection for you,
as Mrs. Thorpe’s father, shall not prevent me from solemnly recording my
abhorrence of such awful infidelity as I believe to be involved in the
words you have just spoken! My religious convictions recoil--”

“Stop, sir!” said Mr. Goodworth, seriously and sternly.

Mr. Thorpe obeyed at once. The old gentleman’s manner was generally
much more remarkable for heartiness than for dignity; but it altered
completely while he now spoke. As he struck his hand on the table, and
rose from his chair, there was something in his look which it was not
wise to disregard.

“Mr. Thorpe,” he went on, more calmly, but very decidedly, “I refrain
from telling you what my opinion is of the ‘respect’ and ‘affection’
which have allowed _you_ to rebuke _me_ in such terms as you have
chosen. I merely desire to say that I shall never need a second reproof
of the same kind at your hands; for I shall never again speak to you
on the subject of my grandson’s education. If, in consideration of this
assurance, you will now permit me, in my turn--not to rebuke--but to
offer you one word of advice, I would recommend you not to be too ready
in future, lightly and cruelly to accuse a man of infidelity because
his religious opinions happen to differ on some subjects from yours. To
infer a serious motive for your opponent’s convictions, however wrong
you may think them, can do _you_ no harm: to infer a scoffing motive can
do _him_ no good. We will say nothing more about this, if you please.
Let us shake hands, and never again revive a subject about which we
disagree too widely ever to discuss it with advantage.”

At this moment the servant came in with lunch. Mr. Goodworth poured
himself out a glass of sherry, made a remark on the weather, and soon
resumed his cheerful, everyday manner. But he did not forget the pledge
that he had given to Mr. Thorpe. From that time forth, he never by word
or deed interfered again in his grandson’s education.

*****

While the theory of Mr. Thorpe’s system of juvenile instruction was
being discussed in the free air of the parlor, the practical working
of that theory, so far as regarded the case of Master Zack, was being
exemplified in anything but a satisfactory manner, in the prison-region
of the dressing-room.

While she ascended the first flight of stairs, Mrs. Thorpe’s ears
informed her that her son was firing off one uninterrupted volley of
kicks against the door of his place of confinement. As this was by no
means an unusual circumstance, whenever the boy happened to be locked up
for bad behavior, she felt distressed, but not at all surprised at what
she heard; and went into the drawing-room, on her way up stairs, to
deposit her Bible and Prayerbook (kept in a morocco case, with gold
clasps) on the little side-table, upon which they were always placed
during week-days. Possibly, she was so much agitated that her hand
trembled; possibly, she was in too great a hurry; possibly, the
household imp who rules the brittle destinies of domestic glass and
china, had marked her out as his destroying angel for that day; but
however it was, in placing the morocco case on the table, she knocked
down and broke an ornament standing near it--a little ivory model of a
church steeple in the florid style, enshrined in a glass case. Picking
up the fragments, and mourning over the catastrophe, occupied some
little time, more than she was aware of, before she at last left the
drawing-room, to proceed on her way to the upper regions.

As she laid her hand on the banisters, it struck her suddenly and
significantly, that the noises in the dressing-room above had entirely
ceased.

The instant she satisfied herself of this, her maternal imagination,
uninfluenced by what Mr. Thorpe had said below stairs, conjured up an
appalling vision of Zack before his father’s looking-glass, with his
chin well lathered, and a bare razor at his naked throat. The child
had indeed a singular aptitude for amusing himself with purely adult
occupations. Having once been incautiously taken into church by his
nurse, to see a female friend of hers married, Zack had, the very next
day, insisted on solemnizing the nuptial ceremony from recollection,
before a bride and bridegroom of his own age, selected from his
playfellows in the garden of the square. Another time, when the gardener
had incautiously left his lighted pipe on a bench while he went
to gather a flower for one of the local nursery-maids, whom he was
accustomed to favor horticulturally in this way, Zack contrived,
undetected, to take three greedy whiffs of pigtail in close succession;
was discovered reeling about the grass like a little drunkard; and had
to be smuggled home (deadly pale, and bathed in cold perspiration) to
recover, out of his mother’s sight, in the congenial gloom of the back
kitchen. Although the precise infantine achievements here cited were
unknown to Mrs. Thorpe, there were plenty more, like them, which she had
discovered; and the warning remembrance of which now hurried the poor
lady up the second flight of stairs in a state of breathless agitation
and alarm.

Zack, however, had not got at the razors; for they were all locked up,
as Mr. Thorpe had declared. But he had, nevertheless, discovered in
the dressing-room a means of perpetrating domestic mischief, which his
father had never thought of providing against. Finding that kicking,
screaming, stamping, sobbing, and knocking down chairs, were quite
powerless as methods of enforcing his liberation, he suddenly suspended
his proceedings; looked all round the room; observed the cock which
supplied his father’s bath with water; and instantly resolved to flood
the house. He had set the water going in the bath, had filled it to
the brim, and was anxiously waiting, perched up on a chair, to see it
overflow--when his mother unlocked the dressing-room door, and entered
the room.

“Oh, you naughty, wicked, shocking child!” cried Mrs. Thorpe, horrified
at what she beheld, but instantly stopping the threatened deluge from
motives of precaution connected with the drawing-room ceiling. “Oh,
Zack! Zack! what will you do next? What _would_ your papa say if he
heard of this? You wicked, wicked, wicked child, I’m ashamed to look at
you!”

And, in very truth, Zack offered at that moment a sufficiently
disheartening spectacle for a mother’s eyes to dwell on. There stood the
young imp, sturdy and upright in his chair, wriggling his shoulders in
and out of his frock, and holding his hands behind him in unconscious
imitation of the favorite action of Napoleon the Great. His light hair
was all rumpled down over his forehead; his lips were swelled; his nose
was red; and from his bright blue eyes Rebellion looked out frankly
mischievous, amid a surrounding halo of dirt and tears, rubbed circular
by his knuckles. After gazing on her son in mute despair for a minute
or so, Mrs. Thorpe took the only course that was immediately open to
her--or, in other words, took the child off the chair.

“Have you learnt your lesson, you wicked boy?” she asked.

“No, I havn’t,” answered Zack, resolutely.

“Then come to the table with me: your papa’s waiting to hear you. Come
here and learn your lesson directly,” said Mrs. Thorpe, leading the way
to the table.

“I won’t!” rejoined Zack, emphasizing the refusal by laying tight hold
of the wet sides of the bath with both hands.

It was lucky for this rebel of six years old that he addressed those
two words to his mother only. If his nurse had heard them, she would
instantly have employed that old-established resource in all educational
difficulties, familiarly known to persons of her condition under the
appellation of “a smack on the head;” if Mr. Thorpe had heard them, the
boy would have been sternly torn away, bound to the back of a chair, and
placed ignominiously with his chin against the table; if Mr. Goodworth
had heard them, the probability is that he would instantly have lost his
temper, and soused his grandson head over ears in the bath. Not one of
these ideas occurred to Mrs. Thorpe, who possessed no ideas. But she
had certain substitutes which were infinitely more useful in the present
emergency: she had instincts.

“Look up at me, Zack,” she said, returning to the bath, and sitting in
the chair by its side; “I want to say something to you.”

The boy obeyed directly. His mother opened her lips, stopped suddenly,
said a few words, stopped again, hesitated--and then ended her first
sentence of admonition in the most ridiculous manner, by snatching at
the nearest towel, and bearing Zack off to the wash-hand basin.

The plain fact was, that Mrs. Thorpe was secretly vain of her child. She
had long since, poor woman, forced down the strong strait-waistcoats of
prudery and restraint over every other moral weakness but this--of all
vanities the most beautiful; of all human failings surely the most
pure! Yes, she was proud of Zack! The dear, naughty, handsome,
church-disturbing, door-kicking, house-flooding Zack! If he had been
a plain-featured boy, she could have gone on more sternly with her
admonition: but to look coolly on his handsome face, made ugly by dirt,
tears, and rumpled hair; to speak to him in that state, while soap,
water, brush and towel, were all within reach, was more than the mother
(or the woman either, for that matter) had the self-denial to do! So,
before it had well begun, the maternal lecture ended impotently in the
wash-hand basin.

When the boy had been smartened and brushed up, Mrs. Thorpe took him on
her lap; and suppressing a strong desire to kiss him on both his round,
shining cheeks, said these words:--

“I want you to learn your lesson, because you will please _me_ by
obeying your papa. I have always been kind to _you,_--now I want you to
be kind to _me.”_

For the first time, Zack hung down his head, and seemed unprepared with
an answer. Mrs. Thorpe knew by experience what this symptom meant. “I
think you are beginning to be sorry for what you have done, and are
going to be a good boy,” she said. “If you are, I know you will give me
a kiss.” Zack hesitated again--then suddenly reached up, and gave his
mother a hearty and loud-sounding kiss on the tip of her chin. “And now
you will learn your lesson?” continued Mrs. Thorpe. “I have always tried
to make _you_ happy, and I am sure you are ready, by this time, to try
and make _me_ happy--are you not, Zack?”

“Yes, I am,” said Zack manfully. His mother took him at once to the
table, on which the “Select Bible Texts for Children” lay open, and
tried to lift him into a chair “No!” said the boy, resisting and shaking
his head resolutely; “I want to learn my lesson on your lap.”

Mrs. Thorpe humored him immediately. She was not a handsome, not even a
pretty woman; and the cold atmosphere of the dressing-room by no means
improved her personal appearance. But, notwithstanding this, she looked
absolutely attractive and interesting at the present moment, as she
sat with Zack in her arms, bending over him while he studied his three
verses in the “Bible Texts.” Women who have been ill-used by nature have
this great advantage over men in the same predicament--wherever there
is a child present, they have a means ready at hand, which they can all
employ alike, for hiding their personal deficiencies. Who ever saw an
awkward woman look awkward with a baby in her arms? Who ever saw an ugly
woman look ugly when she was kissing a child?

Zack, who was a remarkably quick boy when he chose to exert himself,
got his lesson by heart in so short a time that his mother insisted on
hearing him twice over, before she could satisfy herself that he was
really perfect enough to appear in his father’s presence. The second
trial decided her doubts, and she took him in triumph down stairs.

Mr. Thorpe was reading intently, Mr. Goodworth was thinking profoundly,
the rain was falling inveterately, the fog was thickening dirtily, and
the austerity of the severe-looking parlor was hardening apace into its
most adamantine Sunday grimness, as Zack was brought to say his lesson
at his father’s knees. He got through it perfectly again; but his
childish manner, during this third trial, altered from frankness to
distrustfulness; and he looked much oftener, while he said his task, at
Mr. Goodworth than at his father. When the texts had been repeated, Mr.
Thorpe just said to his wife, before resuming his book--“You may tell
the nurse, my dear, to get Zachary’s dinner ready for him--though he
doesn’t deserve it for behaving so badly about learning his lesson.”

“Please, grandpapa, may I look at the picture-book you brought for me
last night, after I was in bed?” said Zack, addressing Mr. Goodworth,
and evidently feeling that he was entitled to his reward now he had
suffered his punishment.

“Certainly not on a Sunday,” interposed Mr. Thorpe; “your grandpapa’s
book is not a book for Sundays.”

Mr. Goodworth started, and seemed about to speak; but recollecting what
he had said to Mr. Thorpe, contented himself with poking the fire. The
book in question was a certain romance, entitled “Jack and the Bean
Stalk,” adorned with illustrations in the freest style of water-color
art.

“If you want to look at picture-books, you know what books you may have
to-day; and your mamma will get them for you when she comes in again,”
 continued Mr. Thorpe.

The works now referred to were, an old copy of the “Pilgrim’s Progress”
 containing four small prints of the period of the last century; and a
“Life of Moses,” illustrated by severe German outlines in the manner of
the modern school. Zack knew well enough what books his father meant,
and exhibited his appreciation of them by again beginning to wriggle his
shoulders in and out of his frock. He had evidently had more than enough
already of the “Pilgrim’s Progress” and the “Life of Moses.”

Mr. Thorpe said nothing more, and returned to his reading. Mr. Goodworth
put his hands in his pockets, yawned disconsolately, and looked, with
a languidly satirical expression in his eyes, to see what his grandson
would do next. If the thought passing through the old gentleman’s mind
at that moment had been put into words, it would have been exactly
expressed in the following sentence:--“You miserable little boy! When I
was your age, how I should have kicked at all this!”

Zack was not long in finding a new resource. He spied Mr. Goodworth’s
cane standing in a corner; and, instantly getting astride of it,
prepared to amuse himself with a little imaginary horse-exercise up and
down the room. He had just started at a gentle canter, when his father
called out, “Zachary!” and brought the boy to a stand-still directly.

“Put back the stick where you took it from,” said Mr. Thorpe; “you
mustn’t do that on Sunday. If you want to move about, you can walk up
and down the room.”

Zack paused, debating for an instant whether he should disobey or burst
out crying.

“Put back the stick,” repeated Mr. Thorpe.

Zack remembered the dressing-room and the “Select Bible Texts for
Children,” and wisely obeyed. He was by this time completely crushed
down into as rigid a state of Sunday discipline as his father could
desire. After depositing the stick in the corner, he slowly walked up to
Mr. Goodworth, with a comical expression of amazement and disgust in his
chubby face, and meekly laid down his head on his grandfather’s knee.

“Never say die, Zack,” said the kind old gentleman, rising and taking
the boy in his arms. “While nurse is getting your dinner ready, let’s
look out of window, and see if it’s going to clear up.”

Mr. Thorpe raised his head disapprovingly from his book, but said
nothing this time.

“Ah, rain! rain! rain!” muttered Mr. Goodworth, staring desperately out
at the miserable prospect, while Zack amused himself by rubbing his nose
vacantly backwards and forwards against a pane of glass. “Rain!
rain! Nothing but rain and fog in November. Hold up, Zack! Ding-dong,
ding-dong; there go the bells for afternoon church! I wonder whether it
will be fine to-morrow? Think of the pudding, my boy!” whispered the old
gentleman with a benevolent remembrance of the consolation which that
thought had often afforded to him, when he was a child himself.

“Yes,” said Zack, acknowledging the pudding suggestion, but declining to
profit by it. “And, please, when I’ve had my dinner, will somebody put
me to bed?”

“Put you to bed!” exclaimed Mr. Goodworth. “Why, bless the boy! what’s
come to him now? He used always to be wanting to stop up.”

“I want to go to bed, and get to to-morrow, and have my picture-book,”
 was the weary and whimpering answer.

“I’ll be hanged, if I don’t want to go to bed too!” soliloquized the old
gentleman under his breath, “and get to to-morrow, and have my ‘Times’
at breakfast. I’m as bad as Zack, every bit!”

“Grandpapa,” continued the child, more wearily than before, “I want to
whisper something in your ear.”

Mr. Goodworth bent down a little. Zack looked round cunningly towards
his father--then putting his mouth close to his grandfather’s ear,
communicated the conclusion at which he had arrived, after the events of
the day, in these words--

_“I say, granpapa, I hate Sunday!”_




BOOK I. THE HIDING.



CHAPTER I. A NEW NEIGHBORHOOD, AND A STRANGE CHARACTER.

At the period when the episode just related occurred in the life of Mr.
Zachary Thorpe the younger--that is to say, in the year 1837--Baregrove
Square was the farthest square from the city, and the nearest to the
country, of any then existing in the north-western suburb of London.
But, by the time fourteen years more had elapsed--that is to say, in
the year 1851--Baregrove Square had lost its distinctive character
altogether; other squares had filched from it those last remnants of
healthy rustic flavor from which its good name had been derived; other
streets, crescents, rows, and villa-residences had forced themselves
pitilessly between the old suburb and the country, and had suspended
for ever the once neighborly relations between the pavement of Baregrove
Square and the pathways of the pleasant fields.

Alexander’s armies were great makers of conquests; and Napoleon’s armies
were great makers of conquests; but the modern Guerilla regiments of the
hod, the trowel, and the brick-kiln, are the greatest conquerors of all;
for they hold the longest the soil that they have once possessed. How
mighty the devastation which follows in the wake of these tremendous
aggressors, as they march through the kingdom of nature, triumphantly
bricklaying beauty wherever they go! What dismantled castle, with the
enemy’s flag flying over its crumbling walls, ever looked so utterly
forlorn as a poor field-fortress of nature, imprisoned on all sides by
the walled camp of the enemy, and degraded by a hostile banner of pole
and board, with the conqueror’s device inscribed on it--“THIS GROUND TO
BE LET ON BUILDING LEASES?” What is the historical spectacle of
Marius sitting among the ruins of Carthage, but a trumpery theatrical
set-scene, compared with the mournful modern sight of the last tree
left standing, on the last few feet of grass left growing, amid the
greenly-festering stucco of a finished Paradise Row, or the naked
scaffolding poles of a half-completed Prospect Place? Oh, gritty-natured
Guerilla regiments of the hod, the trowel, and the brick-kiln! the
town-pilgrim of nature, when he wanders out at fall of day into the
domains which you have spared for a little while, hears strange things
said of you in secret, as he duteously interprets the old, primeval
language of the leaves; as he listens to the death-doomed trees,
still whispering mournfully around him the last notes of their ancient
even-song!

But what avails the voice of lamentation? What new neighborhood
ever stopped on its way into the country, to hearken to the passive
remonstrance of the fields, or to bow to the indignation of outraged
admirers of the picturesque? Never was suburb more impervious to any
faint influences of this sort, than that especial suburb which grew
up between Baregrove Square and the country; removing a walk among
the hedge-rows a mile off from the resident families, with a ruthless
rapidity at which sufferers on all sides stared aghast. First stories
were built, and mortgaged by the enterprising proprietors to get
money enough to go on with the second; old speculators failed and were
succeeded by new; foundations sank from bad digging; walls were blown
down in high winds from hasty building; bricks were called for in such
quantities, and seized on in such haste, half-baked from the kilns,
that they set the carts on fire, and had to be cooled in pails of water
before they could be erected into walls--and still the new suburb defied
all accidents, and grew irrepressibly into a little town of houses,
ready to be let and lived in, from the one end to the other.

The new neighborhood offered house-accommodation--accepted at the higher
prices as yet only to a small extent--to three distinct subdivisions
of the great middle class of our British population. Rents and premises
were adapted, in a steeply descending scale, to the means of the middle
classes with large incomes, of the middle classes with moderate incomes,
and of the middle classes with small incomes. The abodes for the large
incomes were called “mansions,” and were fortified strongly against the
rest of the suburb by being all built in one wide row, shut in at either
end by ornamental gates, and called a “park.” The unspeakable desolation
of aspect common to the whole suburb, was in a high state of perfection
in this part of it. Irreverent street noises fainted dead away on
the threshold of the ornamental gates, at the sight of the hermit
lodge-keeper. The cry of the costermonger and the screech of the
vagabond London boy were banished out of hearing. Even the regular
tradesman’s time-honored business noises at customers’ doors, seemed as
if they ought to have been relinquished here. The frantic falsetto
of the milkman, the crash of the furious butcher’s cart over the
never-to-be pulverized stones of the new road through the “park,”
 always sounded profanely to the passing stranger, in the spick-and-span
stillness of this Paradise of the large incomes.

The hapless small incomes had the very worst end of the whole locality
entirely to themselves, and absorbed all the noises and nuisances, just
as the large incomes absorbed all the tranquillities and luxuries of
suburban existence. Here were the dreary limits at which architectural
invention stopped in despair. Each house in this poor man’s purgatory
was, indeed, and in awful literalness, a brick box with a slate top to
it. Every hole drilled in these boxes, whether door-hole or window-hole,
was always overflowing with children. They often mustered by forties
and fifties in one street, and were the great pervading feature of the
quarter. In the world of the large incomes, young life sprang up like
a garden fountain, artificially playing only at stated periods in the
sunshine. In the world of the small incomes, young life flowed out
turbulently into the street, like an exhaustless kennel-deluge, in all
weathers. Next to the children of the inhabitants, in visible numerical
importance, came the shirts and petticoats, and miscellaneous linen of
the inhabitants; fluttering out to dry publicly on certain days of the
week, and enlivening the treeless little gardens where they hung, with
lightsome avenues of pinafores, and solemn-spreading foliage of stout
Welsh flannel. Here that absorbing passion for oranges (especially
active when the fruit is half ripe, and the weather is bitter cold),
which distinguishes the city English girl of the lower orders,
flourished in its finest development; and here, also, the poisonous
fumes of the holyday shop-boy’s bad cigar told all resident nostrils
when it was Sunday, as plainly as the church bells could tell it to all
resident ears. The one permanent rarity in this neighborhood, on week
days, was to discover a male inhabitant in any part of it, between the
hours of nine in the morning and six in the evening; the one sorrowful
sight which never varied, was to see that every woman, even to the
youngest, looked more or less unhappy, often care-stricken, while youth
was still in the first bud; oftener child-stricken before maturity was
yet in the full bloom.

As for the great central portion of the suburb--or, in other words,
the locality of the moderate incomes--it reflected exactly the lives of
those who inhabited it, by presenting no distinctive character of its
own at all.

In one part, the better order of houses imitated as pompously as they
could, the architectural grandeur of the mansions owned by the large
incomes; in another, the worst order of houses respectably, but
narrowly, escaped a general resemblance to the brick boxes of the
small incomes. In some places, the “park” influences vindicated their
existence superbly in the persons of isolated ladies who, not having a
carriage to go out in for an airing, exhibited the next best thing, a
footman to walk behind them: and so got a pedestrian airing genteelly in
that way. In other places, the obtrusive spirit of the brick boxes
rode about, thinly disguised, in children’s carriages, drawn by
nursery-maids; or fluttered aloft, delicately discernible at angles
of view, in the shape of a lace pocket-handkerchief or a fine-worked
chemisette, drying modestly at home in retired corners of back gardens.
Generally, however, the hostile influences of the large incomes and the
small mingled together on the neutral ground of the moderate incomes;
turning it into the dullest, the dreariest, the most oppressively
conventional division of the whole suburb. It was just that sort of
place where the thoughtful man looking about him mournfully at the
locality, and physiologically observing the inhabitants, would be prone
to stop suddenly, and ask himself one plain, but terrible question: “Do
these people ever manage to get any real enjoyment out of their lives,
from one year’s end to another?”

To the looker-on at the system of life prevailing among the moderate
incomes in England, the sort of existence which that system embodies
seems in some aspects to be without a parallel in any other part of the
civilized world. Is it not obviously true that, while the upper
classes and the lower classes of English society have each their own
characteristic recreations for leisure hours, adapted equally to their
means and to their tastes, the middle classes, in general, have (to
expose the sad reality) nothing of the sort? To take an example from
those eating and drinking recreations which absorb so large a portion
of existence:--If the rich proprietors of the “mansions” in the “park”
 could give their grand dinners, and be as prodigal as they pleased with
their first-rate champagne, and their rare gastronomic delicacies;
the poor tenants of the brick boxes could just as easily enjoy their
tea-garden conversazione, and be just as happily and hospitably
prodigal, in turn, with their porter-pot, their teapot, their plate
of bread-and-butter, and their dish of shrimps. On either side, these
representatives of two pecuniary extremes in society, looked for what
recreations they wanted with their own eyes, pursued those recreations
within their own limits, and enjoyed themselves unreservedly in
consequence. Not so with the moderate incomes: they, in their social
moments, shrank absurdly far from the poor people’s porter and shrimps;
crawled contemptibly near to the rich people’s rare wines and luxurious
dishes; exposed their poverty in imitation by chemical champagne from
second-rate wine merchants, by flabby salads and fetid oyster-patties
from second-rate pastry-cooks; were, in no one of their festive
arrangements, true to their incomes, to their order, or to themselves;
and, in very truth, for all these reasons and many more, got no real
enjoyment out of their lives, from one year’s end to another.

On the outskirts of that part of the new suburb appropriated to these
unhappy middle classes with moderate incomes, there lived a gentleman
(by name Mr. Valentine Blyth) whose life offered as strong a practical
contradiction as it is possible to imagine to the lives of his
neighbors.

He was by profession an artist--an artist in spite of circumstances.
Neither his father, nor his mother, nor any relation of theirs, on
either side, had ever practiced the Art of Painting, or had ever derived
any special pleasure from the contemplation of pictures. They were all
respectable commercial people of the steady fund-holding old school,
who lived exclusively within their own circle; and had never so much as
spoken to a live artist or author in the whole course of their lives.
The City-world in which Valentine’s boyhood was passed, was as destitute
of art influences of any kind as if it had been situated on the coast
of Greenland; and yet, to the astonishment of everybody, he was always
drawing and painting, in his own rude way, at every leisure hour. His
father was, as might be expected, seriously disappointed and amazed at
the strange direction taken by the boy’s inclinations. No one (including
Valentine himself) could ever trace them back to any recognizable
source; but everyone could observe plainly enough that there was no hope
of successfully opposing them by fair means of any kind. Seeing this,
old Mr. Blyth, like a wise man, at last made a virtue of necessity; and,
giving way to his son, entered him, under strong commercial protest, as
a student in the Schools of the Royal Academy.

Here Valentine remained, working industriously, until his twenty-first
birthday. On that occasion, Mr. Blyth had a little serious talk with
him about his prospects in life. In the course of this conversation, the
young man was informed that a rich merchant-uncle was ready to take him
into partnership; and that his father was equally ready to start him
in business with his whole share, as one of three children, in the
comfortable inheritance acquired for the family by the well-known City
house of Blyth and Company. If Valentine consented to this arrangement,
his fortune was secured, and he might ride in his carriage before he was
thirty. If, on the other hand, he really chose to fling away a fortune,
he should not be pinched for means to carry on his studies as a painter.
The interest of his inheritance on his father’s death, should be paid
quarterly to him during his father’s lifetime: the annual independence
thus secured to the young artist, under any circumstances, being
calculated as amounting to a little over four hundred pounds a year.

Valentine was not deficient in gratitude. He took a day to consider
what he should do, though his mind was quite made up about his choice
beforehand; and then persisted in his first determination; throwing away
the present certainty of becoming a wealthy man, for the sake of the
future chance of turning out a great painter.

If he had really possessed genius, there would have been nothing very
remarkable in this part of his history, so far; but having nothing of
the kind, holding not the smallest spark of the great creative fire
in his whole mental composition, surely there was something very
discouraging to contemplate, in the spectacle of a man resolutely
determining, in spite of adverse home circumstances and strong home
temptation, to abandon all those paths in life, along which he might
have walked fairly abreast with his fellows, for the one path in which
he was predestinated by Nature to be always left behind by the way. Do
the announcing angels, whose mission it is to whisper of greatness
to great spirits, ever catch the infection of fallibility from their
intercourse with mortals? Do the voices which said truly to Shakespeare,
to Raphael, and to Mozart, in their youth-time,--You are chosen to
be gods in this world--ever speak wrongly to souls which they are
not ordained to approach? It may be so. There are men enough in all
countries whose lives would seem to prove it--whose deaths have not
contradicted it.

But even to victims such as these, there are pleasant resting-places on
the thorny way, and flashes of sunlight now and then, to make the
cloudy prospect beautiful, though only for a little while. It is not all
misfortune and disappointment to the man who is mentally unworthy of a
great intellectual vocation, so long as he is morally worthy of it; so
long as he can pursue it honestly, patiently, and affectionately, for
its own dear sake. Let him work, though ever so obscurely, in this
spirit towards his labor, and he shall find the labor itself its own
exceeding great reward. In that reward lives the divine consolation,
which, though Fame turn her back on him contemptuously, and Affluence
pass over unpitying to the other side of the way, shall still pour
oil upon all his wounds, and take him quietly and tenderly to the hard
journey’s end. To this one exhaustless solace, which the work, no matter
of what degree, can yield always to earnest workers, the man who has
succeeded, and the man who has failed, can turn alike, as to a common
mother--the one, for refuge from mean envy and slanderous hatred, from
all the sorest evils which even the thriving child of Fame is heir to;
the other, from neglect, from ridicule, from defeat, from all the petty
tyrannies which the pining bondman of Obscurity is fated to undergo.

Thus it was with Valentine. He had sacrificed a fortune to his Art;
and his Art--in the world’s eye at least--had given to him nothing
in return. Friends and relatives who had not scrupled, on being made
acquainted with his choice of a vocation, to call it in question,
and thereby to commit that worst and most universal of all human
impertinences, which consists of telling a man to his face, by the
plainest possible inference, that others are better able than he is
himself to judge what calling in life is fittest and worthiest for
him--friends and relatives who thus upbraided Valentine for his refusal
to accept the partnership in his uncle’s house, affected, on discovering
that he made no public progress whatever in Art, to believe that he was
simply an idle fellow, who knew that his father’s liberality placed him
beyond the necessity of working for his bread, and who had taken up the
pursuit of painting as a mere amateur amusement to occupy his leisure
hours. To a man who labored like poor Blyth, with the steadiest industry
and the highest aspirations, such whispered calumnies as these were of
all mortifications the most cruel, of all earthly insults the hardest to
bear.

Still he worked on patiently, never losing faith or hope, because
he never lost the love of his Art, or the enjoyment of pursuing it,
irrespective of results, however disheartening. Like most other men of
his slight intellectual caliber, the works he produced were various, if
nothing else. He tried the florid style, and the severe style; he was by
turns devotional, allegorical, historical, sentimental, humorous. At one
time, he abandoned figure-painting altogether, and took to landscape;
now producing conventional studies from Nature,--and now, again,
reveling in poetical compositions, which might have hung undetected in
many a collection as doubtful specimens of Berghem or Claude.

But whatever department of painting Valentine tried to excel in, the
same unhappy destiny seemed always in reserve for each completed effort.
For years and years his pictures pleaded hard for admission at the
Academy doors, and were invariably (and not unfairly, it must be
confessed) refused even the worst places on the walls of the Exhibition
rooms. Season after season he still bravely struggled on, never
depressed, never hopeless while he was before his easel, until at
last the day of reward--how long and painfully wrought for!--actually
arrived. A small picture of a very insignificant subject--being only a
kitchen “interior,” with a sleek cat on a dresser, stealing milk from
the tea-tray during the servant’s absence--was benevolently marked
“doubtful” by the Hanging Committee; was thereupon kept in reserve, in
case it might happen to fit any forgotten place near the floor--did fit
such a place--and was really hung up, as Mr. Blyth’s little unit of a
contribution to the one thousand and odd works exhibited to the public,
that year, by the Royal Academy.

But Valentine’s triumph did not end here. His picture of the treacherous
cat stealing the household milk--entitled, by way of appealing jocosely
to the strong Protestant interest, “The Jesuit in the Family,”--was
really sold to an Art-Union prize-holder for ten pounds. Once furnished
with a bank note won by his own brush, Valentine indulged in the most
extravagant anticipations of future celebrity and future wealth; and
proved, recklessly enough, that he believed as firmly as any other
visionary in the wildest dreams of his own imagination, by marrying, and
setting up an establishment, on the strength of the success which had
been achieved by “The Jesuit in the Family.”

He had been for some time past engaged to the lady who had now become
Mrs. Valentine Blyth. She was the youngest of eight sisters, who formed
part of the family of a poor engraver, and who, in the absence of any
mere money qualifications, were all rich alike in the ownership of most
magnificent Christian names. Mrs. Blyth was called Lavinia-Ada; and hers
was by far the humblest name to be found among the whole sisterhood.
Valentine’s relations all objected strongly to this match, not only
on account of the bride’s poverty, but for another and a very serious
reason, which events soon proved to be but too well founded.

Lavinia had suffered long and severely, as a child, from a bad spinal
malady. Constant attention, and such medical assistance as her father
could afford to employ, had, it was said, successfully combated the
disorder; and the girl grew up, prettier than any of her sisters, and
apparently almost as strong as the healthiest of them. Old Mr. Blyth,
however, on hearing that his son was now just as determined to become
a married man as he had formerly been to become a painter, thought it
advisable to make certain inquiries about the young lady’s constitution;
and addressed them, with characteristic caution, to the family doctor,
at a private interview.

The result of this conference was far from being satisfactory. The
doctor was suspiciously careful not to commit himself: he said that he
hoped the spine was no longer in danger of being affected; but that he
could not conscientiously express himself as feeling quite sure about
it. Having repeated these discouraging words to his son, old Mr. Blyth
delicately and considerately, but very plainly, asked Valentine whether,
after what he had heard, he still honestly thought that he would
be consulting his own happiness, or the lady’s happiness either, by
marrying her at all? or, at least, by marrying her at a time when the
doctor could not venture to say that the poor girl might not be even yet
in danger of becoming an invalid for life?

Valentine, as usual, persisted at first in looking exclusively at the
bright side of the question, and made light of the doctor’s authority
accordingly.

“Lavvie and I love each other dearly,” he said with a little trembling
in his voice, but with perfect firmness of manner. “I hope in God that
what you seem to fear will never happen; but even if it should, I shall
never repent having married her, for I know that I am just as ready to
be her nurse as to be her husband. I am willing to take her in sickness
and in health, as the Prayer-Book says. In my home she would have such
constant attention paid to her wants and comforts as she could not have
at her father’s, with his large family and his poverty, poor fellow! And
this is reason enough, I think, for my marrying her, even if the worst
should take place. But I always have hoped for the best, as you know,
father: and I mean to go on hoping for poor Lavvie, just the same as
ever!”

What could old Mr. Blyth, what could any man of heart and honor,
oppose to such an answer as this? Nothing. The marriage took place; and
Valentine’s father tried hard, and not altogether vainly, to feel as
sanguine about future results as Valentine himself.

For several months--how short the time seemed, when they looked back on
it in after-years!--the happiness of the painter and his wife more than
fulfilled the brightest hopes which they had formed as lovers. As for
the doctor’s cautious words, they were hardly remembered now; or, if
recalled, were recalled only to be laughed over. But the time of
bitter grief, which had been appointed, though they knew it not, came
inexorably, even while they were still lightly jesting at all medical
authority round the painter’s fireside. Lavinia caught a severe cold.
The cold turned to rheumatism, to fever, then to general debility, then
to nervous attacks--each one of these disorders, being really but so
many false appearances, under which the horrible spinal malady was
treacherously and slowly advancing in disguise.

When the first positive symptoms appeared, old Mr. Blyth acted with
all his accustomed generosity towards his son. “My purse is yours,
Valentine,” said he; “open it when you like; and let Lavinia, while
there is a chance for her, have the same advice and the same remedies as
if she was the greatest duchess in the land.” The old man’s affectionate
advice was affectionately followed. The most renowned doctors in England
prescribed for Lavinia; everything that science and incessant attention
could do, was done; but the terrible disease still baffled remedy after
remedy, advancing surely and irresistibly, until at last the doctors
themselves lost all hope. So far as human science could foretell events,
Mrs. Blyth, in the opinion of all her medical advisers, was doomed for
the rest of her life never to rise again from the bed on which she lay;
except, perhaps, to be sometimes moved to the sofa, or, in the event of
some favorable reaction, to be wheeled about occasionally in an invalid
chair.

What the shock of this intelligence was, both to husband and wife, no
one ever knew; they nobly kept it a secret even from each other. Mrs.
Blyth was the first to recover courage and calmness. She begged, as an
especial favor, that Valentine would seek consolation, where she knew he
must find it sooner or later, by going back to his studio, and resuming
his old familiar labors, which had been suspended from the time when her
illness had originally declared itself.

On the first day when, in obedience to her wishes, he sat before
his picture again--the half-finished picture from which he had been
separated for so many months--on that first day, when the friendly
occupation of his life seemed suddenly to have grown strange to him;
when his brush wandered idly among the colors, when his tears dropped
fast on the palette every time he looked down on it; when he tried
hard to work as usual, though only for half an hour, only on simple
background places in the composition; and still the brush made false
touches, and still the tints would not mingle as they should, and still
the same words, repeated over and over again, would burst from his lips:
“Oh, poor Lavvie! oh, poor, dear, dear Lavvie!”--even then, the spirit
of that beloved art, which he had always followed so humbly and so
faithfully, was true to its divine mission, and comforted and upheld him
at the last bitterest moment when he laid down his palette in despair.

While he was still hiding his face before the very picture which he and
his wife had once innocently and secretly glorified together, in those
happy days of its beginning that were never to come again, the sudden
thought of consolation shone out on his heart, and showed him how he
might adorn all his afterlife with the deathless beauty of a pure and
noble purpose. Thenceforth, his vague dreams of fame, and of rich men
wrangling with each other for the possession of his pictures, took
the second place in his mind; and, in their stead, sprang up the new
resolution that he would win independently, with his own brush, no
matter at what sacrifice of pride and ambition, the means of surrounding
his sick wife with all those luxuries and refinements which his own
little income did not enable him to obtain, and which he shrank with
instinctive delicacy from accepting as presents bestowed by his father’s
generosity. Here was the consoling purpose which robbed affliction of
half its bitterness already, and bound him and his art together by a
bond more sacred than any that had united them before. In the very hour
when this thought came to him, he rose without a pang to turn the great
historical composition, from which he had once hoped so much, with
its face to the wall, and set himself to finish an unpretending little
“Study” of a cottage courtyard, which he was certain of selling to a
picture-dealing friend. The first approach to happiness which he had
known for a long, long time past, was on the evening of that day, when
he went upstairs to sit with Lavinia; and, keeping secret his purpose
of the morning, made the sick woman smile in spite of her sufferings, by
asking her how she should like to have her room furnished, if she were
the lady of a great lord, instead of being only the wife of Valentine
Blyth.

Then came the happy day when the secret was revealed, and afterwards the
pleasant years when poor Mrs. Blyth’s most splendid visions of luxury
were all gradually realized through her husband’s exertions in his
profession. But for his wife’s influence, Valentine would have been in
danger of abandoning high Art and Classical Landscape altogether, for
cheap portrait-painting, cheap copying, and cheap studies of Still Life.
But Mrs. Blyth, bedridden as she was, contrived to preserve all her old
influence over the labors of the Studio, and would ask for nothing
new, and receive nothing new, in her room, except on condition that her
husband was to paint at least one picture of High Art every year, for
the sake (as she proudly said) of “asserting his intellect and his
reputation in the eyes of the public.” Accordingly, Mr. Blyth’s time
was pretty equally divided between the production of great unsaleable
“compositions,” which were always hung near the ceiling in the
Exhibition, and of small marketable commodities, which were as
invariably hung near the floor.

Valentine’s average earnings from his art, though humble enough in
amount, amply sufficed to fulfill the affectionate purpose for which,
to the last farthing, they were rigorously set aside. “Lavvie’s
Drawing-Room” (this was Mr. Blyth’s name for his wife’s bed-room) really
looked as bright and beautiful as any royal chamber in the universe. The
rarest flowers, the prettiest gardens under glass, bowls with gold and
silver fish in them, a small aviary of birds, an Aeolian harp to put on
the window-sill in summertime, some of Valentine’s best drawings from
the old masters, prettily-framed proof-impressions of engravings done
by Mrs. Blyth’s father, curtains and hangings of the tenderest color and
texture, inlaid tables, and delicately-carved book-cases, were among
the different objects of refinement and beauty which, in the course of
years, Mr. Blyth’s industry had enabled him to accumulate for his
wife’s pleasure. No one but himself ever knew what he had sacrificed in
laboring to gain these things. The heartless people whose portraits he
had painted, and whose impertinences he had patiently submitted to; the
mean bargainers who had treated him like a tradesman; the dastardly men
of business who had disgraced their order by taking advantage of his
simplicity--how hardly and cruelly such insect natures of this world had
often dealt with that noble heart! how despicably they had planted their
small gad-fly stings in the high soul which it was never permitted to
them to subdue!

No! not once to subdue, not once to tarnish! All petty humiliations were
forgotten in one look at “Lavvie’s Drawing-Room;” all stain of insolent
words vanished from Valentine’s memory in the atmosphere of the Studio.
Never was a more superficial judgment pronounced than when his friends
said that he had thrown away his whole life, because he had chosen a
vocation in which he could win no public success. The lad’s earliest
instincts had indeed led him truly, after all. The art to which he had
devoted himself was the only earthly pursuit that could harmonize as
perfectly with all the eccentricities as with all the graces of his
character, that could mingle happily with every joy, tenderly with every
grief; belonging to the quiet, simple, and innocent life, which,
employ him anyhow, it was in his original nature to lead. But for
this protecting art, under what prim disguises, amid what foggy social
climates of class conventionality, would the worlds clerical, legal,
mercantile, military, naval, or dandy, have extinguished this man, if
any one of them had caught him in its snares! Where would then have been
his frolicsome enthusiasm that nothing could dispirit; his inveterate
oddities of thought, speech, and action, which made all his friends
laugh at him and bless him in the same breath; his affections, so manly
in their firmness, so womanly in their tenderness, so childlike in their
frank, fearless confidence that dreaded neither ridicule on the one
side, nor deception on the other? Where, and how, would all these
characteristics have vanished, but for his art--but for the abiding
spirit, ever present to preserve their vital warmth against the outer
and earthly cold? The wisest of Valentine’s friends, who shook their
heads disparagingly whenever his name was mentioned, were at least wise
enough in _their_ generation never to ask themselves such embarrassing
questions as these.


Thus much for the history of the painter’s past life. We may now make
his acquaintance in the appropriate atmosphere of his own Studio.




CHAPTER II. MR. BLYTH IN HIS STUDIO.

It was wintry weather--not such a November winter’s day as some of us
may remember looking at fourteen years ago, in Baregrove Square, but a
brisk frosty morning in January. The country view visible from the back
windows of Mr. Blyth’s house, which stood on the extreme limit of the
new suburb, was thinly and brightly dressed out for the sun’s morning
levee, in its finest raiment of pure snow. The cold blue sky was
cloudless; every sound out of doors fell on the ear with a hearty and
jocund ring; all newly-lit fires burnt up brightly and willingly without
coaxing; and the robin-redbreasts hopped about expectantly on balconies
and windowsills, as if they only waited for an invitation to walk in
and warm themselves, along with their larger fellow creatures, round the
kindly hearth.

The Studio was a large and lofty room, lighted by a skylight, and
running along the side of the house throughout its whole depth. Its
walls were covered with plain brown paper, and its floor was only
carpeted in the middle. The most prominent pieces of furniture were two
large easels placed at either extremity of the room; each supporting a
picture of considerable size, covered over for the present with a
pair of sheets which looked woefully in want of washing. There was a
painting-stand with quantities of shallow little drawers, some too full
to open, others, again, too full to shut; there was a movable platform
to put sitters on, covered with red cloth much disguised in dust;
there was a small square table of new deal, and a large round table
of dilapidated rosewood, both laden with sketch-books, portfolios,
dog’s-eared sheets of drawing paper, tin pots, scattered brushes,
palette-knives, rags variously defiled by paint and oil, pencils,
chalks, port-crayons--the whole smelling powerfully at all points of
turpentine.

Finally, there were chairs in plenty, no one of which, however, at all
resembled the other. In one corner stood a moldy antique chair with a
high back, and a basin of dirty water on the seat. By the side of the
fireplace a cheap straw chair of the beehive pattern was tilted over
against a dining-room chair, with a horse-hair cushion. Before the
largest of the two pictures, and hard by a portable flight of steps,
stood a rickety office-stool. On the platform for sitters a modern easy
chair, with the cover in tatters, invited all models to picturesque
repose. Close to the rosewood table was placed a rocking-chair, and
between the legs of the deal table were huddled together a camp-stool
and a hassock. In short, every remarkable variety of the illustrious
family of Seats was represented in one corner or another of Mr. Blyth’s
painting-room.

All the surplus small articles which shelves, tables, and chairs were
unable to accommodate, reposed in comfortable confusion on the floor.
One half at least of a pack of cards seemed to be scattered about in
this way. A shirt-collar, three gloves, a boot, a shoe, and half a
slipper; a silk stocking, and a pair of worsted muffetees; three
old play-bills rolled into a ball; a pencil-case, a paper-knife, a
tooth-powder-box without a lid, and a superannuated black-beetle trap
turned bottom upwards, assisted in forming part of the heterogeneous
collection of rubbish strewed about the studio floor. And worse than
all--as tending to show that the painter absolutely enjoyed his own
disorderly habits--Mr. Blyth had jocosely desecrated his art, by making
it imitate litter where, in all conscience, there was real litter enough
already. Just in the way of anybody entering the room, he had painted,
on the bare floor, exact representations of a new quill pen and a very
expensive-looking sable brush, lying all ready to be trodden upon by
entering feet. Fresh visitors constantly attested the skillfulness of
these imitations by involuntarily stooping to pick up the illusive pen
and brush; Mr. Blyth always enjoying the discomfiture and astonishment
of every new victim, as thoroughly as if the practical joke had been a
perfectly new one on each successive occasion.

Such was the interior condition of the painting-room, after the owner
had inhabited it for a period of little more than two months!

The church-clock of the suburb has just struck ten, when quick, light
steps approach the studio door. A gentleman enters--trips gaily over the
imitative pen and brush--and, walking up to the fire, begins to warm his
back at it, looking about him rather absently, and whistling “Drops of
Brandy” in the minor key. This gentleman is Mr. Valentine Blyth.

He looks under forty, but is really a little over fifty. His face is
round and rosy, and not marked by a single wrinkle in any part of it.
He has large, sparkling black eyes; wears neither whiskers, beard, nor
mustache; keeps his thick curly black hair rather too closely cut; and
has a briskly-comical kindness of expression in his face, which it is
not easy to contemplate for the first time without smiling at him. He
is tall and stout, always wears very tight trousers, and generally keeps
his wristbands turned up over the cuffs of his coat. All his movements
are quick and fidgety. He appears to walk principally on his toes,
and seems always on the point of beginning to dance, or jump, or run
whenever he moves about, either in or out of doors. When he speaks he
has an odd habit of ducking his head suddenly, and looking at the person
whom he addresses over his shoulder. These, and other little personal
peculiarities of the same undignified nature, all contribute to make him
exactly that sort of person whom everybody shakes hands with, and nobody
bows to, on a first introduction. Men instinctively choose him to be the
recipient of a joke, girls to be the male confidant of all flirtations
which they like to talk about, children to be their petitioner for the
pardon of a fault, or the reward of a half-holiday. On the other hand,
he is decidedly unpopular among that large class of Englishmen, whose
only topics of conversation are public nuisances and political abuses;
for he resolutely looks at everything on the bright side, and has never
read a leading article or a parliamentary debate in his life. In brief,
men of business habits think him a fool, and intellectual women with
independent views cite him triumphantly as an excellent specimen of the
inferior male sex.

Still whistling, Mr. Blyth walks towards an earthen pipkin in one corner
of the studio, and takes from it a little china palette which he has
neglected to clean since he last used it. Looking round the room for
some waste paper, on which he can deposit the half-dried old paint that
has been scraped off with the palette knife, Mr. Blyth’s eyes happen
to light first on the deal table, and on four or five notes which lie
scattered over it.

These he thinks will suit his purpose as well as anything else, so he
takes up the notes, but before making use of them, reads their contents
over for the second time--partly by way of caution, partly though a
dawdling habit, which men of his absent disposition are always too ready
to contract. Three of these letters happen to be in the same scrambling,
blotted handwriting. They are none of them very long, and are the
production of a former acquaintance of the reader’s, who has somewhat
altered in height and personal appearance during the course of the last
fourteen years. Here is the first of the notes which Valentine is now
reading:--


“Dear Blyth,--My father says Theaters are the Devil’s Houses, and I
must be home by eleven o’clock. I’m sure I never did anything wrong at a
Theater, which I might not have done just the same anywhere else; unless
laughing over a good play is one of the _national sins_ he’s always
talking about. I can’t stand it much longer, even for my mother’s sake!
You are my only friend. I shall come and see you to-morrow, so mind and
be at home. How I wish I was an artist! Yours ever, Z. THORPE, JUN.”


Shaking his head and smiling at the same time, Mr. Blyth finishes this
letter--drops a perfect puddle of dirty paint and turpentine in the
middle, over the words “national sins,” throws the paper into the
fire--and goes on to note number two:


“Dear Blyth,--I couldn’t come yesterday, because of another quarrel at
home, and my mother crying about it, of course. My father smelt tobacco
smoke at morning prayers. It was my coat, which I forgot to air at the
fire the night before; and he found it out, and said he wouldn’t have
me smoke, because it led to dissipation--but I told him (which is true)
that lots of parsons smoked. I wish you visited at our house, and could
come and say a word on my side. Dear Blyth, I am perfectly wretched;
for I have had all my cigars taken from me; and I am, yours truly, Z.
THORPE, JUN.”


A third note is required before the palette can be scraped clean.
Mr. Blyth reads the contents rather gravely on this occasion; rapidly
plastering his last morsels of waste paint upon the paper as he goes on,
until at length it looks as if it had been well peppered with all the
colors of the rainbow.

Zack’s third letter of complaint certainly promised serious domestic
tribulation for the ruling power at Baregrove Square:--


“Dear Blyth,--I have given in--at least for the present. I told my
father about my wanting to be an artist, and about your saying that I
had a good notion of drawing, and an eye for a likeness; but I might
just as well have talked to one of your easels. He means to make a man
of business of me. And here I have been, for the last three weeks, at
a Tea Broker’s office in the city, in consequence. They all say it’s
a good opening for me, and talk about the respectability of commercial
pursuits. I don’t want to be respectable, and I hate commercial
pursuits. What is the good of forcing me into a merchant’s office, when
I can’t say my Multiplication table? Ask my mother about that: _she’ll_
tell you! Only fancy me going round tea warehouses in filthy Jewish
places like St. Mary-Axe, to take samples, with a blue bag to carry them
about in; and a dirty junior clerk, who cleans his pen in his hair, to
teach me how to fold up parcels! Isn’t it enough to make my blood boil
to think of it? I can’t go on, and I won’t go on in this way! Mind
you’re at home to-morrow; I’m coming to speak to you about how I’m to
begin learning to be an artist. The junior clerk is going to do all
my sampling work for me in the morning; and we are to meet in the
afternoon, after I have come away from you, at a chop-house; and then
go back to the office as if we had been together all day, just as usual.
Ever yours, Z. THORPE, JUN.--P. S. My mind’s made up: if the worst comes
to the worst, I shall leave home.”


“Oh, dear me! oh, dear! dear me!” says Valentine, mournfully rubbing his
palette clean with a bit of rag. “What will it all end in, I wonder. Old
Thorpe’s going just the way, with his obstinate severity, to drive Zack
to something desperate. Coming here to-morrow, he says?” continues Mr.
Blyth, approaching the smallest of the two pictures, placed on easels at
opposite extremities of the room. “Coming to-morrow! He never dates
his notes; but I suppose, as this one came last night, to-morrow means
to-day.”

Saying these words with eyes absently fixed on his picture, Valentine
withdraws the sheet stretched over the canvas, and discloses a Classical
Landscape of his own composition.

If Mr. Blyth had done nothing else in producing the picture which now
confronted him, he had at least achieved one great end of all Classic
Art, by reminding nobody of anything simple, familiar, or pleasing to
them in nature. In the foreground of his composition, were the three
lanky ruined columns, the dancing Bacchantes, the musing philosopher,
the mahogany-colored vegetation, and the bosky and branchless trees,
with which we have all been familiar, from our youth upwards, in
“classical compositions.” Down the middle of the scene ran that
wonderful river, which is always rippling with the same regular waves;
and always bearing onward the same capsizable galleys, with the same
vermilion and blue revelers striking lyres on the deck. On the bank
where there was most room for it, appeared our old, old friend, the
architectural City, which nobody could possibly live in; and which is
composed of nothing but temples, towers, monuments, flights of steps,
and bewildering rows of pillars. In the distance, our favorite blue
mountains were as blue and as peaky as ever, on Valentine’s canvas; and
our generally-approved pale yellow sun was still disfigured by the
same attack of aerial jaundice, from which he has suffered ever since
classical compositions first forbade him to take refuge from the sight
behind a friendly cloud.

After standing before his picture in affectionate contemplation of its
beauties for a minute or so, Valentine resumes the business of preparing
his palette.

As the bee comes and goes irregularly from flower to flower; as the
butterfly flutters in a zig-zag course from one sunny place on the
garden wall to another--or, as an old woman runs from wrong omnibus to
wrong omnibus, at the Elephant and Castle, before she can discover the
right one; as a countryman blunders up one street, and down another,
before he can find the way to his place of destination in London--so
does Mr. Blyth now come and go, flutter, run, and blunder in a mighty
hurry about his studio, in search of missing colors which ought to be in
his painting-box, but which are not to be found there. While he is still
hunting through the room, his legs come into collision with a large
drawing-board on which there is a blank sheet of paper stretched. This
board seems to remind Mr. Blyth of some duty connected with it. He
places it against two chairs, in a good light; then approaching a shelf
on which some plaster-casts are arranged, takes down from it a bust of
the Venus de Medici--which bust he next places on his old office
stool, opposite to the two chairs and the drawing-board. Just as these
preparations are completed, the door of the studio opens, and a very
important member of the painter’s household--who has not yet been
introduced to the reader, and who is in no way related either to
Valentine or his wife--enters the room.

This mysterious resident under Mr. Blyth’s roof is a Young Lady.

She is dressed in very pretty, simple, Quaker-like attire. Her gown is
of a light-gray color, covered by a neat little black apron in front,
and fastened round the throat over a frill collar. The sleeves of this
dress are worn tight to the arm, and are terminated at the wrists by
quaint-looking cuffs of antique lace, the only ornamental morsels of
costume which she has on. It is impossible to describe how deliciously
soft, bright, fresh, pure, and delicate, this young lady is, merely
as an object to look at, contrasted with the dingy disorder of the
studio-sphere through which she now moves. The keenest observers,
beholding her as she at present appears, would detect nothing in her
face or figure, her manner or her costume, in the slightest degree
suggestive of impenetrable mystery, or incurable misfortune. And yet,
she happens to be the only person in Mr. Blyth’s household at whom
prying glances are directed, whenever she walks out; whose very
existence is referred to by the painter’s neighbors with an invariable
accompaniment of shrugs, sighs, and lamenting looks; and whose “case” is
always compassionately designated as “a sad one,” whenever it is brought
forward, in the course of conversation, at dinner-tables and tea-tables
in the new suburb.

Socially, we may be all easily divided into two classes in this
world--at least in the civilized part of it. If we are not the people
whom others talk about, then we are sure to be the people who talk about
others. The young lady who had just entered Mr. Blyth’s painting-room,
belonged to the former order of human beings.

She seemed fated to be used as a constant subject of conversation by
her fellow-creatures. Even her face alone--simply as a face--could not
escape perpetual discussion; and that, too, among Valentine’s friends,
who all knew her well, and loved her dearly. It was the oddest thing in
the world, but no one of them could ever agree with another (except on
a certain point, to be presently mentioned) as to which of her personal
attractions ought to be first selected for approval, or quoted as
particularly asserting her claims to the admiration of all worshippers
of beauty.

To take three or four instances of this. There was Mr. Gimble, the civil
little picture-dealers and a very good friend in every way to Valentine:
there was Mr. Gimble, who declared that her principal charm was in her
complexion--her fair, clear, wonderful complexion--which he would defy
any artist alive to paint, let him try ever so hard, or be ever so great
a man. Then came the Dowager Countess of Brambledown, the frolicsome
old aristocrat, who was generally believed to be “a little cracked;”
 who haunted Mr. Blyth’s studio, after having once given him an order to
paint her rare China tea-service, and her favorite muff, in one
group; and who differed entirely from the little picture-dealer.
“Fiddle-de-dee!” cried her ladyship, scornfully, on hearing Mr. Gimble’s
opinion quoted one day. “The man may know something about pictures, but
he is an idiot about women. Her complexions indeed! I could make as
good a complexion for myself (we old women are painters too, in our
way, Blyth). Don’t tell me about her complexion--it’s her eyes! her
incomparable blue eyes, which would have driven the young men of _my_
time mad--mad, I give you my word of honor! Not a gentleman, sir, in my
youthful days--and they _were_ gentlemen then--but would have been too
happy to run away with her for her eyes alone; and what’s more, to have
shot any man who said as much as ‘Stop him!’ Complexion, indeed,
Mr. Gimble? I’ll complexion you, next time I find my way into your
picture-gallery! Take a pinch of snuff, Blyth; and never repeat nonsense
in my hearing again.”

There was Mr. Bullivant, the enthusiastic young sculptor, with the mangy
flow of flaxen hair, and the plump, waxy face, who wrote poetry, and
showed, by various sonnets, that he again differed completely about the
young lady from the Dowager Countess of Brambledown and Mr. Gimble. This
gentleman sang fluently, on paper--using, by the way, a professional
epithet--about her “chiselled mouth”,

     “Which breathed of rapture and the balmy South.”

He expatiated on

     “Her sweet lips smiling at her dimpled chin,
      Whose wealth of kisses gods might long to win--”

and much more to the same maudlin effect. In plain prose, the ardent
Bullivant was all for the lower part of the young lady’s face, and
actually worried her, and Mr. Blyth, and everybody in the house, until
he got leave to take a cast of it.

Lastly, there was Mrs. Blyth’s father; a meek old gentleman, with a
continual cold in the head; who lived on marvelously to the utmost verge
of human existence--as very poor men, with very large families, who
would be much better out of this world than in it, very often do.
There was this low-speaking, mildly-infirm, and perpetually-snuffling
engraver, who, on being asked to mention what he most admired in her,
answered that he thought it was her hair, “which was of such a nice
light brown color; or, perhaps, it might be the pleasant way in which
she carried her head, or, perhaps, her shoulders--or, perhaps, her head
_and_ shoulders, both together. Not that his opinion was good for much
in tasty matters of this kind, for which reason he begged to apologize
for expressing it at all.” In speaking thus of his opinion, the worthy
engraver surely depreciated himself most unjustly: for, if the father of
eight daughters cannot succeed in learning (philoprogenitively speaking)
to be a good judge of women, what man can?

However, there was one point on which Mr. Gimble, Lady Brambledown, Mr.
Bullivant, Mrs. Blyth’s father, and hosts of friends besides, were all
agreed, without one discordant exception.

They unanimously asserted that the young lady’s face was the nearest
living approach they had ever seen to that immortal “Madonna” face,
which has for ever associated the idea of beauty with the name of
RAPHAEL. The resemblance struck everybody alike, even those who were
but slightly conversant with pictures, the moment they saw her. Taken in
detail, her features might be easily found fault with. Her eyes might be
pronounced too large, her mouth too small, her nose not Grecian enough
for some people’s tastes. But the general effect of these features,
the shape of her head and face, and especially her habitual expression,
reminded all beholders at once, and irresistibly, of that image of
softness, purity, and feminine gentleness, which has been engraven on
all civilized memories by the “Madonnas” of Raphael.

It was in consequence of this extraordinary resemblance, that her own
English name of Mary had been, from the first, altered and Italianized
by Mr. and Mrs. Blyth, and by all intimate friends, into “Madonna.” One
or two extremely strict and extremely foolish people objected to any
such familiar application of this name, as being open, in certain
directions, to an imputation of irreverence. Mr. Blyth was not generally
very quick at an answer; but, on this occasion, he had three answers
ready before the objections were quite out of his friends’ mouths.

In the first place, he said that he and his friends used the name only
in an artist-sense, and only with reference to Raphael’s pictures.
In the next place, he produced an Italian dictionary, and showed that
“Madonna” had a second meaning in the language, signifying simply and
literally, “My lady.” And, in conclusion, he proved historically, that
“Madonna” had been used in the old times as a prefix to the names of
Italian women; quoting, for example, “Madonna Pia,” whom he happened to
remember just at that moment, from having once painted a picture from
one of the scenes of her terrible story. These statements silenced all
objections; and the young lady was accordingly much better known in the
painter’s house as “Madonna” than as “Mary.”

On now entering the studio, she walked up to Valentine, laid a hand
lightly on each of his shoulders, and so lifted herself to be kissed on
the forehead. Then she looked down on his palette, and observing
that some colors were still missing from it, began to search for them
directly in the painting-box. She found them in a moment, and appealed
to Mr. Blyth with an arch look of inquiry and triumph. He nodded,
smiled, and held out his palette for her to put the colors on it
herself. Having done this very neatly and delicately, she next looked
round the room, and at once observed the bust of Venus placed on the
office stool.

At the same time, Mr. Blyth, who saw the direction taken by her eyes,
handed to her a port-crayon with some black chalk, which he had been
carefully cutting to a point for the last minute or two. She took it
with a little mock curtsey, pouting her lip slightly, as if drawing
the Venus was work not much to her taste--smiled when she saw Valentine
shaking his head, and frowning comically at her--then went away at once
to the drawing-board, and sat down opposite Venus, in which position
she offered as decided a living contradiction as ever was seen to the
assertion of the classical idea of beauty, as expressed in the cast that
she was about to copy.

Mr. Blyth, on his side, set to work at last on the Landscape; painting
upon the dancing Bacchantes in the foreground of his picture, whose
scanty dresses stood sadly in need of a little brightening up. While
the painter and the young lady are thus industriously occupied with
the business of the studio, there is leisure to remark on one rather
perplexing characteristic of their intercourse, so far as it has yet
proceeded on this particular winter’s morning.

Ever since Madonna has been in the room, not one word has she spoken to
Valentine; and not one word has Valentine (who can talk glibly enough
to himself) spoken to her. He never said “Good morning,” when he kissed
her--or, “Thank you for finding my lost colors,”--or, “I have set the
Venus, my dear, for your drawing lesson to-day.” And she, woman as she
is, has actually not asked him a single question, since she entered the
studio! What can this absolute and remarkable silence mean between two
people who look as affectionately on each other as these two look, every
time their eyes meet!

Is this one of the Mysteries of the painter’s fireside?

Who is Madonna?

What is her real name besides Mary?

Is it Mary Blyth?

*****

Some years ago, an extraordinary adventure happened to Valentine in the
circus of an itinerant Equestrian Company. In that adventure, and in the
strange results attending it, the clue lies hidden, which leads to the
Mystery of the painter’s fireside, and reveals the story of this book.




CHAPTER III. MADONNA’S CHILDHOOD.

In the autumn of 1838, Mrs. Blyth’s malady had for some time past
assumed the permanent form from which it seldom afterwards varied. She
now suffered little actual pain, except when she quitted a recumbent
posture. But the general disorganization produced by almost exclusive
confinement to one position, had, even at this early period, begun
to work sad changes in her personal appearance. She suffered that
mortifying misfortune just as bravely and resignedly as she had suffered
the first great calamity of her incurable disorder. Valentine never
showed that he thought her altered; Valentine’s kindness was just as
affectionate and as constant as it had ever been in the happier days of
their marriage. So encouraged, Lavinia had the heart to bear all burdens
patiently; and could find sources of happiness for herself, where others
could discover nothing but causes for grief.

The room she inhabited was already, through Valentine’s self-denying
industry, better furnished than any other room in the house; but was far
from presenting the same appearance of luxury and completeness to which
it attained in the course of after-years.

The charming maple-wood and ivory bookcase, with the prettily-bound
volumes ranged in such bright regularity along its shelves, was there
certainly, as early as the autumn of 1838. It would not, however, at
that time have formed part of the furniture of Mrs. Blyth’s room, if
her husband had not provided himself with the means of paying for it,
by accepting a certain professional invitation to the country, which
he knew before, and would enable him to face the terrors of the
upholsterer’s bill.

The invitation in question had been sent to him by a clerical
friend, the Reverend Doctor Joyce, Rector of St. Judy’s, in the large
agricultural town of Rubbleford. Valentine had produced a water-color
drawing of one of the Doctor’s babies, when the family at the Rectory
were in London for a season, and this drawing had been shown to all the
neighbors by the worthy clergyman on his return. Now, although Mr. Blyth
was not over-successful in the adult department of portrait-art, he was
invariably victorious in the infant department. He painted all babies
on one ingenious plan; giving them the roundest eyes, the chubbiest
red cheeks, the most serenely good-humored smiles, and the neatest
and whitest caps ever seen on paper. If fathers and their male friends
rarely appreciated the fidelity of his likenesses, mothers and nurses
invariably made amends for their want of taste. It followed, therefore,
almost as a matter of course, that the local exhibition of the Doctor’s
drawing must bring offers of long-clothes-portrait employment to
Valentine. Three resident families decided immediately to have portraits
of their babies, if the painter would only travel to their houses to
take the likenesses. A bachelor sporting squire in the neighborhood also
volunteered a commission of another sort. This gentleman arrived (by
a logical process which it is hopeless to think of tracing) at the
conclusion, that a man who was great at babies, must necessarily be
marvelous at horses; and determined, in consequence, that Valentine
should paint his celebrated cover-hack. In writing to inform his friend
of these offers, Doctor Joyce added another professional order on his
own account, by way of appropriate conclusion to his letter. Here, then,
were five commissions, which would produce enough--cheaply as Valentine
worked--to pay, not only for the new bookcase, but for the books to put
in it when it came home.

Having left his wife in charge of two of her sisters, who were forbidden
to leave the house till his return, Mr. Blyth started for the rectory;
and once there, set to work on the babies with a zeal and good-humor
which straightway won the hearts of mothers and nurses, and made him a
great Rubbleford reputation in the course of a few days. Having done the
babies to admiration, he next undertook the bachelor squire’s hack. Here
he had some trouble. The sporting gentleman would look over him while he
painted; would bewilder him with the pedigree of the horse; would have
the animal done in the most unpicturesque view; and sternly forbade
all introduction of “tone,” “light and shade,” or purely artistic
embellishment of any kind, in any part of the canvas. In short, the
squire wanted a sign-board instead of a picture, and he at last got what
he wanted to his heart’s content.

One evening, while Valentine--still deeply immersed in the difficulties
of depicting the cover-hack--was returning to the Rectory, after a day’s
work at the Squire’s house, his attention was suddenly attracted in the
high street of Rubbleford, by a flaming placard pasted up on a dead wall
opposite the market-house.

He immediately joined the crowd of rustics congregated round the
many-colored and magnificent sheet of paper, and read at the top of
it, in huge blue letters:--“JUBBER’S CIRCUS. THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE
WORLD.” After this came some small print, which nobody lost any time
in noticing. But below the small print appeared a perfect galaxy of
fancifully shaped scarlet letters, which fascinated all eyes, and
informed the public that the equestrian company included “MISS FLORINDA
BEVERLEY, known,” (here the letters turned suddenly green) “wherever
the English language was known, as The Amazonian Empress of Equitation.”
 This announcement was followed by the names of inferior members of the
Company; by a program of the evening’s entertainments; by testimonials
extracted from the provincial press; by illustrations of gentlemen with
lusty calves and spangled drawers, and of ladies with smiling faces,
shameless petticoats, and pirouetting legs. These illustrations, and
the particulars which preceded them were carefully digested by all Mr.
Blyth’s neighbors; but Mr. Blyth himself passed them over unnoticed.
His eye had been caught by something at the bottom of the placard, which
instantly absorbed his whole attention.

In this place the red letters appeared again, and formed the following
words and marks of admiration:--

     THE MYSTERIOUS FOUNDLING!
     AGED TEN YEARS!!
     TOTALLY DEAF AND DUMB!!!

Underneath came an explanation of what the red letters referred to,
occupying no less than three paragraphs of stumpy small print, every
word of which Valentine eagerly devoured. This is what he read:--

“Mr. Jubber, as proprietor of the renowned Circus, has the honor of
informing the nobility, gentry, and public, that the above wonderful
Deaf and Dumb Female Child will appear between the first and second
parts of the evening’s performances. Mr. J. has taken the liberty
of entitling this Marvel of Nature, The Mysterious Foundling; no one
knowing who her father is, and her mother having died soon after her
birth, leaving her in charge of the Equestrian Company, who have been
fond parents and careful guardians to her ever since.

“She was originally celebrated in the annals of Jubber’s Circus, or
Eighth Wonder of the World, as The Hurricane Child of the Desert; having
appeared in that character, whirled aloft at the age of seven years in
the hand of Muley Ben Hassan, the renowned Scourer of Sahara, in his
daring act of Equitation, as exhibited to the terror of all England,
in Jubber’s Circus. At that time she had her hearing and speech quite
perfect. But Mr. J. deeply regrets to state that a terrific accident
happened to her soon afterwards. Through no fault on the part of
The Scourer (who, overcome by his feelings at the result of the
above-mentioned frightful accident, has gone back to his native wilds a
moody and broken-hearted man), she slipped from his hand while the three
horses bestrode by the fiery but humane Arab were going at a gallop, and
fell, shocking to relate, outside the Ring, on the boarded floor of the
Circus. She was supposed to be dead. Mr. Jubber instantly secured the
inestimable assistance of the Faculty, who found that she was still
alive, and set her arm, which had been broken. It was only afterwards
discovered that she had utterly lost her sense of hearing. To use the
emphatic language of the medical gentlemen (who all spoke with tears in
their eyes), she had been struck stone deaf by the shock. Under these
melancholy circumstances, it was found that the faculty of speech
soon failed her altogether; and she is now therefore Totally Deaf AND
Dumb--but Mr. J. rejoices to say, quite cheerful and in good health
notwithstanding.

“Mr. Jubber being himself the father of a family, ventures to think that
these little particulars may prove of some interest to an Intelligent,
a Sympathetic, and a Benevolent Public. He will simply allude, in
conclusion, to the performances of the Mysterious Foundling, as
exhibiting perfection hitherto unparalleled in the Art of Legerdemain,
with wonders of untraceable intricacy on the cards, originally the
result of abstruse calculations made by that renowned Algebraist,
Mohammed Engedi, extending over a period of ten years, dating from the
year 1215 of the Arab Chronology. More than this Mr. Jubber will not
venture to mention, for ‘Seeing is Believing,’ and the Mysterious
Foundling must be seen to be believed. For prices of admission consult
bottom of bill.”

Mr. Blyth read this grotesquely shocking narrative with sentiments which
were anything rather than complimentary to the taste, the delicacy, and
the humanity of the fluent Mr. Jubber. He consulted the bottom of the
bill, however, as requested; and ascertained what were the prices
of admission--then glanced at the top, and observed that the first
performance was fixed for that very evening--looked about him absently
for a minute or two--and resolved to be present at it.

Most assuredly, Valentine’s resolution did not proceed from that dastard
insensibility to all decent respect for human suffering which could
feast itself on the spectacle of calamity paraded for hire, in the
person of a deaf and dumb child of ten years old. His motives for going
to the circus were stained by no trace of such degradation as this. But
what were they then? That question he himself could not have answered:
it was a common predicament with him not to know his own motives,
generally from not inquiring into them. There are men who run
breathlessly--men who walk cautiously--and men who saunter easily
through the journey of life. Valentine belonged to the latter class;
and, like the rest of his order, often strayed down a new turning,
without being able to realize at the time what purpose it was which
first took him that way. Our destinies shape the future for us out
of strange materials: a traveling circus sufficed them, in the first
instance, to shape a new future for Mr. Blyth.

He first went on to the Rectory to tell them where he was going, and to
get a cup of tea, and then hurried off to the circus, in a field outside
the town.

The performance had begun some time when he got in. The Amazonian
Empress (known otherwise as Miss Florinda Beverley) was dancing
voluptuously on the back of a cantering piebald horse with a Roman nose.
Round and round careered the Empress, beating time on the saddle with
her imperial legs to the tune of “Let the Toast be Dear Woman,” played
with intense feeling by the band. Suddenly the melody changed to “See
the Conquering Hero Comes;” the piebald horse increased his speed; the
Empress raised a flag in one hand, and a javelin in the other, and began
slaying invisible enemies in the empty air, at full (circus) gallop. The
result on the audience was prodigious; Mr. Blyth alone sat unmoved. Miss
Florinda Beverley was not even a good model to draw legs from, in the
estimation of this anti-Amazonian painter!

When the Empress was succeeded by a Spanish Guerilla, who robbed,
murdered, danced, caroused, and made love on the back of a cream-colored
horse--and when the Guerilla was followed by a clown who performed
superhuman contortions, and made jokes by the yard, without the
slightest appearance of intellectual effort--still Mr. Blyth exhibited
no demonstration of astonishment or pleasure. It was only when a bell
rang between the first and second parts of the performance, and the band
struck up “Gentle Zitella,” that he showed any symptoms of animation.
Then he suddenly rose; and, moving down to a bench close against the
low partition which separated the ring from the audience, fixed his eyes
intently on a doorway opposite to him, overhung by a frowzy red curtain
with a tinsel border.

From this doorway there now appeared Mr. Jubber himself, clothed in
white trousers with a gold stripe, and a green jacket with military
epaulettes. He had big, bold eyes, a dyed mustache, great fat, flabby
cheeks, long hair parted in the middle, a turn-down collar with a
rose-colored handkerchief; and was, in every respect, the most atrocious
looking stage vagabond that ever painted a blackguard face. He led with
him, holding her hand, the little deaf and dumb girl, whose misfortune
he had advertised to the whole population of Rubbleford.

The face and manner of the child, as she walked into the center of the
circus, and made her innocent curtsey and kissed her hand, went to the
hearts of the whole audience in an instant. They greeted her with such
a burst of applause as might have frightened a grown actress. But not a
note from those cheering voices, not a breath of sound from those loudly
clapping hands could reach her; she could see that they were welcoming
her kindly, and that was all!

When the applause had subsided, Mr. Jubber asked for the loan of a
handkerchief from one of the ladies present, and ostentatiously bandaged
the child’s eyes. He then lifted her upon the broad low wall which
encircled the ring, and walked her round a little way (beginning from
the door through which he had entered), inviting the spectators to test
her total deafness by clapping their hands, shouting, or making any
loud noise they pleased close at her ear. “You might fire off a cannon,
ladies and gentlemen,” said Mr. Jubber, “and it wouldn’t make her start
till after she’d smelt the smoke!”

To the credit of the Rubbleford audience, the majority of them declined
making any practical experiments to test the poor child’s utter
deafness. The women set the example of forbearance, by entreating that
the handkerchief might be taken off so that they might see her pretty
eyes again. This was done at once, and she began to perform her
conjuring tricks with Mr. Jubber and one of the ring-keepers on either
side of her, officiating as assistants. These tricks, in themselves,
were of the simplest and commonest kind; and derived all their
attraction from the child’s innocently earnest manner of exhibiting
them, and from the novelty to the audience of communicating with her
only by writing on a slate. They never tired of scrawling questions, of
saying “poor little thing!” and of kissing her whenever they could get
the opportunity, while she slowly went round the circus. “Deaf and dumb!
ah, dear, dear, deaf and dumb!” was the general murmur of sympathy which
greeted her from each new group, as she advanced; Mr. Jubber invariably
adding with a smile: “And as you see, ladies and gentlemen, in excellent
health and spirits, notwithstanding: as hearty and happy, I pledge you
my sacred word of honor, as the very best of us!”

While she was thus delighting the spectators on one side of the circus,
how were the spectators on the other side, whose places she had not yet
reached, contriving to amuse themselves?

From the moment of the little girl’s first appearance, ample recreation
had been unconsciously provided for them by a tall, stout, and florid
stranger, who appeared suddenly to lose his senses the moment he set
eyes on the deaf and dumb child. This gentleman jumped up and sat down
again excitably a dozen times in a minute; constantly apologizing on
being called to order, and constantly repeating the offense the moment
afterwards. Mad and mysterious words, never heard before in Rubbleford,
poured from his lips. “Devotional beauty,” “Fra Angelico’s angels,”
 “Giotto and the cherubs,” “Enough to bring the divine Raphael down from
heaven to paint her.” Such were a few fragments of the mad gentleman’s
incoherent mutterings, as they reached his neighbors’ ears. The
amusement they yielded was soon wrought to its climax by a joke from an
attorney’s clerk, who suggested that this queer man, with the rosy face,
must certainly be the long-lost father of the “Mysterious Foundling!”
 Great gratification was consequently anticipated from what might
take place when the child arrived opposite the bench occupied by the
excitable stranger.

Slowly, slowly, the little light figure went round upon the broad
partition wall of the ring, until it came near, very near, to the place
where Valentine was sitting.

Ah, woeful sight! so lovely, yet so piteous to look on! Shall she never
hear kindly human voices, the song of birds, the pleasant murmur of
the trees again? Are all the sweet sounds that sing of happiness to
childhood, silent for ever to _her?_ From those fresh, rosy lips shall
no glad words pour forth, when she runs and plays in the sunshine? Shall
the clear, laughing tones be hushed always? the young, tender life be
for ever a speechless thing, shut up in dumbness from the free world of
voices? Oh! Angel of judgment! hast thou snatched her hearing and her
speech from this little child, to abandon her in helpless affliction to
such profanation as she now undergoes? Oh, Spirit of mercy! how long thy
white-winged feet have tarried on their way to this innocent sufferer,
to this lost lamb that cannot cry to the fold for help! Lead, ah, lead
her tenderly to such shelter as she has never yet found for herself!
Guide her, pure as she is now, from this tainted place to pleasant
pastures, where the sunshine of human kindness shall be clouded no more,
and Love and Pity shall temper every wind that blows over her with the
gentleness of perpetual spring!

Slowly, slowly, the light figure went round the great circle of gazers,
ministering obediently to their pleasure, waiting patiently till their
curiosity was satisfied. And now, her weary pilgrimage was well nigh
over for the night. She had arrived at the last group of spectators who
had yet to see what she looked like close, and what tricks she could
exhibit with her cards.

She stopped exactly opposite to Valentine; and when she looked up, she
looked on him alone.

Was there something in the eager sympathy of his eyes as they met hers,
which spoke to the little lonely heart in the sole language that could
ever reach it? Did the child, with the quick instinct of the deaf and
dumb, read his compassionate disposition, his pity and longing to help
her, in his expression at that moment? It might have been so. Her pretty
lips smiled on him as they had smiled on no one else that night; and
when she held out some cards to be chosen from, she left unnoticed
the eager hands extended on either side of her, and presented them to
Valentine only.

He saw the small fingers trembling as they held the cards; he saw the
delicate little shoulders and the poor frail neck and chest bedizened
with tawdry mock jewelry and spangles; he saw the innocent young face,
whose pure beauty no soil of stage paint could disfigure, with the smile
still on the parted lips, but with a patient forlornness in the sad
blue eyes, as if the seeing-sense that was left, mourned always for the
hearing and speaking senses that were gone--he marked all these things
in an instant, and felt that his heart was sinking as he looked. A
dimness stole over his sight; a suffocating sensation oppressed his
breathing; the lights in the circus danced and mingled together; he
bent down over the child’s hand, and took it in his own; twice kissed it
fervently; then, to the utter amazement of the laughing crowd about him,
rose up suddenly, and forced his way out as if he had been flying for
his life.

There was a momentary confusion among the audience. But Mr. Jubber was
too old an adept in stage-business of all kinds not to know how to stop
the growing tumult directly, and turn it into universal applause.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried, with a deep theatrical quiver in his
voice--“I implore you to be seated, and to excuse the conduct of the
party who has just absented himself. The talent of the Mysterious
Foundling has overcome people in that way in every town of England. Do I
err in believing that a Rubbleford audience can make kind allowances for
their weaker fellow-creatures? Thanks, a thousand thanks in the name of
this darling and talented child, for your cordial, your generous, your
affectionate, your inestimable reception of her exertions to-night!”
 With this peroration Mr. Jubber took his pupil out of the ring, amid the
most vehement cheering and waving of hats and handkerchiefs. He was
too much excited by his triumph to notice that the child, as she walked
after him, looked wistfully to the last in the direction by which
Valentine had gone out.

“The public like excitement,” soliloquized Mr. Jubber, as he disappeared
behind the red curtain. “I must have all this in the bills to-morrow.
It’s safe to draw at least thirty shillings extra into the house at
night.”

In the meantime, Valentine, after some blundering at wrong doors, at
last found his way out of the circus, and stood alone on the cool grass,
in the cloudless autumn moonlight. He struck his stick violently on the
ground, which at that moment represented to him the head of Mr. Jubber;
and was about to return straight to the rectory, when he heard a
breathless voice behind him, calling:--“Stop, sir! oh, do please stop
for one minute!”

He turned round. A buxom woman in a tawdry and tattered gown was running
towards him as fast as her natural impediments to quick progression
would permit.

“Please, sir,” she cried--“Please, sir, wasn’t you the gentleman that
was taken queer at seeing our little Foundling? I was peeping through
the red curtain, sir, just at the time.”

Instead of answering the question, Valentine instantly began to
rhapsodize about the child’s face.

“Oh, sir! if you know anything about her,” interposed the woman, “for
God’s sake don’t scruple to tell it to me! I’m only Mrs. Peckover,
sir, the wife of Jemmy Peckover, the clown, that you saw in the circus
to-night. But I took and nursed the little thing by her poor mother’s
own wish; and ever since that time--”

“My dear, good soul,” said Mr. Blyth, “I know nothing of the poor
little creature. I only wish from the bottom of my heart that I could do
something to help her and make her happy. If Lavvie and I had had such
an angel of a child as that,” continued Valentine, clasping his hands
together fervently, “deaf and dumb as she is, we should have thanked God
for her every day of our lives!”

Mrs. Peckover was apparently not much used to hear such sentiments as
these from strangers. She stared up at Mr. Blyth with two big tears
rolling over her plump cheeks.

“Mrs. Peckover! Hullo there, Peck! where are you?” roared a stern voice
from the stable department of the circus, just as the clown’s wife
seemed about to speak again.

Mrs. Peckover started, curtsied, and, without uttering another word,
went back even faster than she had come out. Valentine looked after her
intently, but made no attempt to follow: he was thinking too much of
the child to think of that. When he moved again, it was to return to the
rectory.

He penetrated at once into the library, where Doctor Joyce was spelling
over the “Rubbleford Mercury,” while Mrs. Joyce sat opposite to him,
knitting a fancy jacket for her youngest but one. He was hardly inside
the door before he began to expatiate in the wildest manner on the
subject of the beautiful deaf and dumb girl. If ever man was in love
with a child at first sight, he was that man. As an artist, as a
gentleman of refined tastes, and as the softest-hearted of male
human beings, in all three capacities, he was enslaved by that little
innocent, sad face. He made the Doctor’s head whirl again; he fairly
stopped Mrs. Joyce’s progress with the fancy jacket, as he sang the
child’s praises, and compared her face to every angel’s face that had
ever been painted, from the days of Giotto to the present time. At last,
when he had fairly exhausted his hearers and himself, he dashed abruptly
out of the room, to cool down his excitement by a moonlight walk in the
rectory garden.

“What a very odd man he is!” said Mrs. Joyce, taking up a dropped stitch
in the fancy jacket.

“Valentine, my love, is the best creature in the world,” rejoined the
doctor, folding up the Rubbleford Mercury, and directing it for the
post; “but, as I often used to tell his poor father (who never would
believe me), a little cracked. I’ve known him go on in this way about
children before--though I must own, not quite so wildly, perhaps, as he
talked just now.”

“Do you think he’ll do anything imprudent about the child? Poor thing!
I’m sure I pity her as heartily as anybody can.”

“I don’t presume to think,” answered the doctor, calmly pressing the
blotting-paper over the address he had just written. “Valentine is one
of those people who defy all conjecture. No one can say what he will do,
or what he won’t. A man who cannot resist an application for shelter and
supper from any stray cur who wags his tail at him in the street; a man
who blindly believes in the troubles of begging-letter impostors; a man
whom I myself caught, last time he was down here, playing at marbles
with three of my charity-boys in the street, and promising to treat them
to hardbake and gingerbeer afterwards, is--in short, is not a man whose
actions it is possible to speculate on.”

Here the door opened, and Mr. Blyth’s head was popped in, surmounted
by a ragged straw hat with a sky-blue ribbon round it. “Doctor,”
 said Valentine, “may I ask an excellent woman, with whom I have made
acquaintance, to bring the child here to-morrow morning for you and Mrs.
Joyce to see?”

“Certainly,” said the good-humored rector, laughing. “The child by all
means, and the excellent woman too.”

“Not if it’s Miss Florinda Beverley!” interposed Mrs. Joyce (who had
read the Circus placard). “Florinda, indeed! Jezebel would be a better
name for her!”

“My dear Madam, it isn’t Florinda,” cried Valentine, eagerly. “I quite
agree with you; her name ought to be Jezebel. And, what’s worse, her
legs are out of drawing.”

“Mr. Blyth!!!” exclaimed Mrs. Joyce, indignant at this professional
criticism on Jezebel’s legs.

“Why don’t you tell us at once who the excellent woman is?” cried the
doctor, secretly tickled by the allusion which had shocked his wife.

“Her name’s Peckover,” said Valentine; “she’s a respectable married
woman; she doesn’t ride in the circus at all; and she nursed the poor
child by her mother’s own wish.”

“We shall be delighted to see her to-morrow,” said the warm-hearted
rector--“or, no--stop! Not to-morrow; I shall be out. The day after.
Cake and cowslip wine for the deaf and dumb child at twelve o’clock--eh,
my dear?”

“That’s right! God bless you! you’re always kindness itself,” cried
Valentine; “I’ll find out Mrs. Peckover, and let her know. Not a wink
of sleep for me to-night--never mind!” Here Valentine suddenly shut the
door, then as suddenly opened it again, and added, “I mean to finish
that infernal horse-picture to-morrow, and go to the circus again in
the evening.” With these words he vanished; and they heard him soon
afterwards whistling his favorite “Drops of Brandy,” in the rectory
garden.

“Cracked! cracked!” cried the doctor. “Dear old Valentine!”

“I’m afraid his principles are very loose,” said Mrs. Joyce, whose
thoughts still ran on the unlucky professional allusion to Jezebel’s
legs.

The next morning, when Mr. Blyth presented himself at the stables, and
went on with the portrait of the cover-hack, the squire had no longer
the slightest reason to complain of the painter’s desire to combine
in his work picturesqueness of effect with accuracy of resemblance.
Valentine argued no longer about introducing “light and shade,” or
“keeping the background subdued in tone.” His thoughts were all with the
deaf and dumb child and Mrs. Peckover; and he smudged away recklessly,
just as he was told, without once uttering so much as a word of protest.
By the evening he had concluded his labor. The squire said it was one of
the best portraits of a horse that had ever been taken: to which piece
of criticism the writer of the present narrative is bound in common
candor to add, that it was also the very worst picture that Mr. Blyth
had ever painted.

On returning to Rubbleford, Valentine proceeded at once to the circus;
placing himself, as nearly as he could, in the same position which he
had occupied the night before.

The child was again applauded by the whole audience, and again went
through her performance intelligently and gracefully, until she
approached the place where Valentine was standing. She started as she
recognized his face, and made a step forward to get nearer to him; but
was stopped by Mr. Jubber, who saw that the people immediately in front
of her were holding out their hands to write on her slate, and have her
cards dealt round to them in their turn. The child’s attention appeared
to be distracted by seeing the stranger again who had kissed her hand so
fervently--she began to look confused--and ended by committing an open
and most palpable blunder in the very first trick that she performed.

The spectators good-naturedly laughed, and some of them wrote on her
slate, “Try again, little girl.” Mr. Jubber made an apology, saying that
the extreme enthusiasm of the reception accorded to his pupil had shaken
her nerves; and then signed to her, with a benevolent smile, but with
a very sinister expression in his eyes, to try another trick. She
succeeded in this; but still showed so much hesitation, that Mr. Jubber,
fearing another failure, took her away with him while there was a chance
of making a creditable exit.

As she was led across the ring, the child looked intently at Valentine.

There was terror in her eyes--terror palpable enough to be remarked
by some of the careless people near Mr. Blyth. “Poor little thing! she
seems frightened at the man in the fine green jacket,” said one. “And
not without cause, I dare say,” added another. “You don’t mean that
he could ever be brute enough to ill use a child like that?--it’s
impossible!” cried a third.

At this moment the clown entered the ring. The instant before he shouted
the well-known “Here we are!” Valentine thought he heard a strange cry
behind the red curtain. He was not certain about it, but the mere doubt
made his blood run chill. He listened for a minute anxiously. There was
no chance now, however, for testing the correctness of his suspicion.
The band had struck up a noisy jig tune, and the clown was capering and
tumbling wonderfully, amid roars of laughter.

“This may be my fault,” thought Valentine. _“This!_ What?” He was afraid
to pursue that inquiry. His ruddy face suddenly turned pale; and he left
the circus, determined to find out what was really going on behind the
red curtain.

He walked round the outside of the building, wasting some time before he
found a door to apply at for admission. At last he came to a sort of
a passage, with some tattered horse-cloths hanging over its outer
entrance.

“You can’t come in here,” said a shabby lad, suddenly appearing from the
inside in his shirt sleeves.

Mr. Blyth took out half-a-crown. “I want to see the deaf and dumb child
directly!”

“Oh, all right! go in,” muttered the lad, pocketing the money greedily.

Valentine hastily entered the passage. As soon as he was inside, a sound
reached his ears at which his heart sickened and turned faint. No words
can describe it in all the horror of its helplessness--it was the moan
of pain from a dumb human creature.

He thrust aside a curtain, and stood in a filthy place, partitioned off
from the stables on one side, and the circus on the other, with canvas
and old boards. There, on a wooden stool, sat the woman who had accosted
him the night before, crying, and soothing the child, who lay shuddering
on her bosom. The sobs of the clown’s wife mingled with the inarticulate
wailing, so low, yet so awful to hear; and both sounds were audible with
a fearful, unnatural distinctness, through the merry melody of the jig,
and the peals of hearty laughter from the audience in the circus.

“Oh, my God!” cried Valentine, horror-struck at what he heard, “stop
her! don’t let her moan in that way!”

The woman started from her seat, and put the child down, then recognized
Mr. Blyth and rushed up to him.

“Hush!” she whispered eagerly, “don’t call out like that! The villain,
the brutal, heartless villain is somewhere about the stables. If he
hears you, he’ll come in and beat her again.--Oh, hush! hush, for God’s
sake! It’s true he beat her--the cowardly, hellish brute!--only for
making that one little mistake with the cards. No! no! no! don’t speak
out so loud, or you’ll ruin us. How did you ever get in here?--Oh!
you must be quiet! There, sit down--Hark! I’m sure he’s coming! Oh! go
away--go away!”

She tried to pull Valentine out of the chair into which she had thrust
him but the instant before. He seized tight hold of her hand and refused
to move. If Mr. Jubber had come in at that moment, he would have been
thrashed within an inch of his life.

The child had ceased moaning when she saw Valentine. She anxiously
looked at him through her tears--then turned away quickly--took out her
little handkerchief--and began to dry her eyes.

“I can’t go yet--I’ll promise only to whisper--you must listen to me,”
 said Mr. Blyth, pale and panting for breath; “I mean to prevent this
from happening again--don’t speak!--I’ll take that injured, beautiful,
patient little angel away from this villainous place: I will, if I go
before a magistrate!”

The woman stopped him by pointing suddenly to the child.

She had put back the handkerchief, and was approaching him. She came
close and laid one hand on his knee, and timidly raised the other as
high as she could towards his neck. Standing so, she looked up quietly
into his face. The pretty lips tried hard to smile once more; but they
only trembled for an instant, and then closed again. The clear, soft
eyes, still dim with tears, sought his with an innocent gaze of inquiry
and wonder. At that moment, the expression of the sad and lovely little
face seemed to say--“You look as if you wanted to be kind to me; I wish
you could find out some way of telling me of it.”

Valentine’s heart told him what was the only way. He caught her up in
his arms, and half smothered her with kisses. The frail, childish hands
rose trembling, and clasped themselves gently round his neck; and
the fair head drooped lower and lower, wearily, until it lay on his
shoulder.

The clown’s wife turned away her face, desperately stifling with
both hands the sobs that were beginning to burst from her afresh. She
whispered, “Oh, go, sir,--pray go! Some of the riders will be in here
directly; you’ll get us into dreadful trouble!”

Valentine rose, still holding the child in his arms. “I’ll go if you
promise me--”

“I’ll promise you anything, sir!”

“You know the rectory! Doctor Joyce’s--the clergyman--my kind friend--”

“Yes, sir; I know it. Do please, for little Mary’s sake be quick as you
can!”

“Mary! Her name’s Mary!” Valentine drew back into a corner, and began
kissing the child again.

“You must be out of your senses to keep on in that way after what I’ve
told you!” cried the clown’s wife, wringing her hands in despair, and
trying to drag him out of the corner. “Jubber will be in here in another
minute. She’ll be beaten again, if you’re caught with her; oh Lord! oh
Lord! will nothing make you understand that?”

He understood it only too well, and put the child down instantly, his
face turning pale again; his agitation becoming so violent that he never
noticed the hand which she held out towards him, or the appealing look
that said so plainly and pathetically: “I want to bid you good-bye; but
I can’t say it as other children can.” He never observed this; for he
had taken Mrs. Peckover by the arm, and had drawn her away hurriedly
after him into the passage.

The child made no attempt to follow them: she turned aside, and, sitting
down in the darkest corner of the miserable place, rested her head
against the rough partition which was all that divided her from the
laughing audience. Her lips began to tremble again: she took out the
handkerchief once more, and hid her face in it.

“Now, recollect your promise,” whispered Valentine to the clown’s wife,
who was slowly pushing him out all the time he was speaking to her.
“You must bring little Mary to the Rectory to-morrow morning at twelve
o’clock exactly--you must! or I’ll come and fetch her myself--”

“I’ll bring her, sir, if you’ll only go now. I’ll bring her--I will, as
true as I stand here!”

“If you don’t!” cried Valentine, still distrustful, and trembling all
over with agitation--“If you don’t!”--He stopped; for he suddenly felt
the open air blowing on his face. The clown’s wife was gone, and nothing
remained for him to threaten, but the tattered horse-cloths that hung
over the empty doorway.




CHAPTER IV. MADONNA’S MOTHER.

It is a quarter to twelve by the hall clock at the Rectory, and one of
the finest autumn mornings of the whole season. Vance, Doctor Joyce’s
middle-aged man servant, or “Bishop” Vance, as the small wits of
Rubbleford call him, in allusion to his sleek and solemn appearance,
his respectable manner, his clerical cravat, and his speckless black
garments, is placing the cake and cowslip wine on the dining-table, with
as much formality and precision as if his master expected an archbishop
to lunch, instead of a clown’s wife and a little child of ten years old.
It is quite a sight to see Vance retiring and looking at the general
effect of each knife and fork as he lays it down; or solemnly strutting
about the room, with a spotless napkin waving gently in his hand; or
patronisingly confronting the pretty housemaid at the door, and taking
plates and dishes from her with the air of a kitchen Sultan who can
never afford to lose his dignity for a moment in the presence of the
female slaves.

The dining-room window opens into the Rectory garden. The morning
shadows cast by the noble old elm-trees that grow all round, are fading
from the bright lawn. The rich flower-beds gleam like beds of jewels in
the radiant sunshine. The rookery is almost deserted, a solitary sleepy
_caw_ being only heard now and then at long intervals. The singing
of birds, and the buzzing of busy insects sound faint, distant, and
musical. On a shady seat, among the trees, Mrs. Joyce is just visible,
working in the open air. One of her daughters sits reading on the turf
at her feet. The other is giving the younger children a ride by turns
on the back of a large Newfoundland dog, who walks along slowly with his
tongue hanging out, and his great bushy tail wagging gently. A prettier
scene of garden beauty and family repose could not be found in all
England, than the scene which the view through the Rectory window
now presents. The household tranquillity, however, is not entirely
uninterrupted. Across the picture, of which Vance and the luncheon-table
form the foreground, and the garden with Mrs. Joyce and the young ladies
the middle-distance and background, there flits from time to time
an unquiet figure. This personage is always greeted by Leo, the
Newfoundland dog, with an extra wag of the tail; and is apostrophized
laughingly by the young ladies, under the appellation of “funny Mr.
Blyth.”

Valentine has in truth let nobody have any rest, either in the house or
the garden, since the first thing in the morning. The rector having
some letters to write, has bolted himself into his study in despair, and
defies his excitable friend from that stronghold, until the arrival of
Mrs. Peckover with the deaf and dumb child has quieted the painter’s
fidgety impatience for the striking of twelve o’clock, and the presence
of the visitors from the circus. As for the miserable Vance, Mr. Blyth
has discomposed, worried, and put him out, till he looks suffocated
with suppressed indignation. Mr. Blyth has invaded his sanctuary to ask
whether the hall clock is right, and has caught him “cleaning himself”
 in his shirt sleeves. Mr. Blyth has broken one of his tumblers, and has
mutinously insisted on showing him how to draw the cork of the cowslip
wine bottle. Mr. Blyth has knocked down a fork and two spoons, just as
they were laid straight, by whisking past the table like a madman on his
way into the garden. Mr. Blyth has bumped up against the housemaid in
returning to the dining-room, and has apologized to Susan by a joke
which makes her giggle ecstatically in Vance’s own face. If this sort
of thing is to go on for a day or two longer, though he has been twenty
years at the Rectory, Vance will be goaded into giving the doctor
warning.

It is five minutes to twelve. Valentine has skipped into the garden for
the thirtieth time at least, to beg that Mrs. Joyce and the young ladies
will repair to the dining-room, and be ready to set Mrs. Peckover and
her little charge quite at their ease the moment they come in. Mrs.
Joyce consents to this proposal at last, and takes his offered arm;
touching it, however, very gingerly, and looking straight before her,
while he talks, with an air of matronly dignity and virtuous reserve.
She is still convinced that Mr. Blyth’s principles are extremely loose,
and treats him as she might have treated Don Juan himself under similar
circumstances.

They all go into the dining-room. Mrs. Joyce and her daughters take
their places, looking deliciously cool and neat in their bright morning
dresses. Leo drops down lazily on the rug inside the window, with a
thump of his great heavy body that makes the glasses ring. The doctor
comes in with his letters for the post, and apostrophizes Valentine with
a harmless clerical joke. Vance solemnly touches up the already perfect
arrangement of the luncheon table. The clock strikes twelve. A faint
meek ring is heard at the Rectory bell.

Vance struts slowly to the door, when--Heaven and earth! are no
conventions held sacred by these painters of pictures?--Mr. Blyth dashes
past him with a shout of “Here they are!” and flies into the hall to
answer the gate himself. Vance turns solemnly round towards his master,
trembling and purple in the face, with an appealing expression, which
says plainly enough:--“If _you_ mean to stand this sort of outrage, sir,
I beg most respectfully to inform you that _I_ don’t.” The rector bursts
out laughing; the young ladies follow his example; the Newfoundland dog
jumps up, and joins in with his mighty bark. Mrs. Joyce sits silent, and
looks at Vance, and sympathizes with him.

Mr. Blyth is soon heard again in the hall, talking at a prodigious rate,
without one audible word of answer proceeding from any other voice. The
door of the dining-room, which has swung to, is suddenly pushed open,
jostling the outraged Vance, who stands near it, into such a miserably
undignified position flat against the wall, that the young ladies begin
to titter behind their handkerchiefs as they look at him. Valentine
enters, leading in Mrs. Peckover and the deaf and dumb child, with such
an air of supreme happiness, that he looks absolutely handsome for the
moment. The rector, who is, in the best and noblest sense of the word, a
gentleman, receives Mrs. Peckover as politely and cordially as he would
have received the best lady in Rubbleford. Mrs. Joyce comes forward with
him, very kind too, but a little reserved in her manner, nevertheless;
being possibly apprehensive that any woman connected with the circus
must be tainted with some slight flavor of Miss Florinda Beverley. The
young ladies drop down into the most charming positions on either side
of the child, and fall straightway into fits of ecstasy over her
beauty. The dog walks up, and pokes his great honest muzzle among them
companionably. Vance stands rigid against the wall, and disapproves
strongly of the whole proceeding.

Poor Mrs. Peckover! She had never been in such a house as the Rectory,
she had never spoken to a doctor of divinity before in her life. She was
very hot and red and trembling, and made fearful mistakes in grammar,
and clung as shyly to Mr. Blyth as if she had been a little girl. The
rector soon contrived, however, to settle her comfortably in a seat by
the table. She curtseyed reverentially to Vance, as she passed by him;
doubtless under the impression that he was a second doctor of divinity,
even greater and more learned than the first. He stared in return
straight over her head, with small unwinking eyes, his cheeks turning
slowly from deep red to dense purple. Mrs. Peckover shuddered inwardly,
under the conviction that she had insulted a dignitary, who was hoisted
up on some clerical elevation, too tremendous to be curtseyed to by such
a social atom as a clown’s wife.

Mrs. Joyce had to call three times to her daughters before she could get
them to the luncheon-table. If she had possessed Valentine’s eye for the
picturesque and beautiful, she would certainly have been incapable of
disturbing the group which her third summons broke up.

In the center stood the deaf and dumb child, dressed in a white frock,
with a little silk mantilla over it, made from a cast-off garment
belonging to one of the ladies of the circus. She wore a plain straw
hat, ornamented with a morsel of narrow white ribbon, and tied under
the chin with the same material. Her clear, delicate complexion was
overspread by a slight rosy tinge--the tender coloring of nature,
instead of the coarsely-glaring rouge with which they disfigured her
when she appeared before the public. Her wondering blue eyes, that
looked so sad in the piercing gas-light, appeared to have lost that
sadness in the mellow atmosphere of the Rectory dining-room. The tender
and touching stillness which her affliction had cast over her face,
seemed a little at variance with its childish immaturity of feature and
roundness of form, but harmonized exquisitely with the quiet smile which
seemed habitual to her when she was happy--gratefully and unrestrainedly
happy, as she now felt among the new friends who were receiving her, not
like a stranger and an inferior, but like a younger sister who had been
long absent from them.

She stood near the window, the center figure of the group, offering a
little slate that hung by her side, with a pencil attached to it, to the
rector’s eldest daughter, who was sitting at her right hand on a stool.
The second of the young ladies knelt on the other side, with both her
arms round the dog’s neck; holding him back as he stood in front of the
child, so as to prevent him from licking her face, which he had made
several resolute attempts to do, from the moment when she first entered
the room. Both the Doctor’s daughters were healthy, rosy English
beauties in the first bloom of girlhood; and both were attired in
the simplest and prettiest muslin dresses, very delicate in color and
pattern. Pity and admiration, mixed with some little perplexity and
confusion, gave an unusual animation to their expressions; for they
could hardly accustom themselves as yet to the idea of the poor child’s
calamity. They talked to her eagerly, as if she could hear and answer
them--while she, on her part, stood looking alternately from one to the
other, watching their lips and eyes intently, and still holding out
the slate, with her innocent gesture of invitation and gentle look of
apology, for the eldest girl to write on. The varying expressions of the
three; the difference in their positions, the charming contrast between
their light, graceful figures and the bulky strength and grand solidity
of form in the noble Newfoundland dog who stood among them; the lustrous
background of lawn and flowers and trees, seen through the open window;
the sparkling purity of the sunshine which fell brightly over one
part of the group; the transparency of the warm shadows that lay so
caressingly, sometimes on a round smooth cheek, sometimes over ringlets
of glistening hair, sometimes on the crisp folds of a muslin dress--all
these accidental combinations of the moment, these natural and elegant
positions of nature’s setting, these accessories of light and shade and
background garden objects beautifully and tenderly filling up the scene,
presented together a picture which it was a luxury to be able to look
on, which it seemed little short of absolute profanation to disturb.

Mrs. Joyce, nevertheless, pitilessly disarranged it. In a moment the
living picture was destroyed; the young ladies were called to their
mother’s side; the child was placed between Valentine and Mrs. Peckover,
and the important business of luncheon began in earnest.

It was wonderful to hear how Mr. Blyth talked; how he alternately
glorified the clown’s wife for the punctual performance of her promise,
and appealed triumphantly to the rector to say, whether he had not
underrated rather than exaggerated little Mary’s beauty. It was also
wonderful to see Mrs. Peckover’s blank look of astonishment when she
found the rigid doctor of divinity, who would not so much as notice her
curtsey, suddenly relax into blandly supplying her with everything she
wanted to eat or drink. But a very much more remarkable study of human
nature than either of these, was afforded by the grimly patronizing and
profoundly puzzled aspect of Vance, as he waited, under protest, upon a
woman from a traveling circus. It is something to see the Pope serving
the Pilgrims their dinner, during the Holy Week at Rome. Even that
astounding sight, however, fades into nothing, as compared with the
sublimer spectacle of Mr. Vance waiting upon Mrs. Peckover.

The rector, who was a sharp observer in his own quiet, unobtrusive way,
was struck by two peculiarities in little Mary’s behavior during lunch.
In the first place, he remarked with some interest and astonishment,
that while the clown’s wife was, not unnaturally, very shy and
embarrassed in her present position, among strangers who were greatly
her social superiors, little Mary had maintained her self-possession,
and had unconsciously adapted herself to her new sphere from the moment
when she first entered the dining-room. In the second place, he observed
that she constantly nestled close to Valentine; looked at him oftener
than she looked at any one else; and seemed to be always trying,
sometimes not unsuccessfully, to guess what he was saying to others by
watching his expression, his manner, and the action of his lips. “That
child’s character is no common one,” thought Doctor Joyce; “she is older
at heart than she looks; and is almost as fond of Blyth already as he is
of her.”

When lunch was over, the eldest Miss Joyce whispered a petition in her
mother’s ear, “May Carry and I take the dear little girl out with us to
see our gardens, mamma?”

“Certainly, my love, if she likes to go. You had better ask her--Ah,
dear! dear! I forgot--I mean, write on her slate. It’s so hard to
remember she’s deaf and dumb, when one sees her sitting there looking
so pretty and happy. She seems to like the cake. Remind me, Emmy, to tie
some up for her in paper before she goes away.”

Miss Emily and Miss Caroline went round to the child directly, and
made signs for the slate. They alternately wrote on it with immense
enthusiasm, until they had filled one side; signing their initials in
the most business-like manner at the end of each line, thus:--

“Oh, do come and see my gardens. E. J.”--“We will gather you such a
nice nosegay. C. J.”--“I have got some lovely little guinea-pigs. B.
J.”--“And Mark, our gardener, has made me a summer-house, with such
funny chairs in it. C. J.”--“You shall have my parasol to keep the sun
off. B. J.”--“And we will send Leo into the water as often as you like
him to go. C. J.”--Thus they went on till they got to the bottom of the
slate.

The child, after nodding her head and smiling as she read each fresh
invitation, turned the slate over, and, with some little triumph at
showing that she could write too, began slowly to trace some large text
letters in extremely crooked lines. It took her a long time--especially
as Mr. Blyth was breathlessly looking over her shoulder all the
while--to get through these words: “Thank you for being so kind to me. I
will go with you anywhere you like.”

In a few minutes more the two young ladies and little Mary were walking
over the bright lawn, with Leo in close attendance, carrying a stick in
his mouth.

Valentine started up to follow them; then appeared suddenly to remember
something, and sat down again with a very anxious expression on his
face. He and Doctor Joyce looked at one another significantly. Before
breakfast, that morning, they had been closeted at a private interview.
Throughout the conversation which then took place, Mr. Blyth had been
unusually quiet, and very much in earnest. The doctor had begun by
being incredulous and sarcastic in a good-humored way; but had ended by
speaking seriously, and making a promise under certain conditions. The
time for the performance of that promise had now arrived.

“You needn’t wait, Vance,” said the rector. “Never mind about taking the
things away. I’ll ring when you’re wanted.”

Vance gloomily departed.

“Now the young people have left us, Mrs. Peckover,” said Doctor Joyce,
turning to the clown’s wife, “there is a good opportunity for my making
a proposition to you, on behalf of my old and dear friend here, Mr.
Blyth, who, as you must have noticed, feels great sympathy and fondness
for your little Mary. But, before I mention this proposal (which I am
sure you will receive in the best spirit, however it may surprise you),
I should wish--we should all wish, if you have no objection--to hear any
particulars you can give us on the subject of this poor child. Do you
feel any reluctance to tell us in confidence whatever you know about
her?”

“Oh dear no, sir!” exclaimed Mrs. Peckover, very much amazed. “I should
be ashamed of myself if I went making any objections to anything you
wanted to know about little Mary. But it’s strange to me to be in a
beautiful place like this, drinking wine with gentlefolks--and I’m
almost afraid--”

“Not afraid, I hope, that you can’t tell us what we are so anxious
to know, quite at your ease, and in your own way?” said the rector,
pleasantly. “Pray, Mrs. Peckover, believe I am sincere in saying that we
meet on equal terms here. I have heard from Mr. Blyth of your motherly
kindness to that poor helpless child; and I am indeed proud to take your
hand, and happy to see you here, as one who should always be an honored
guest in a clergyman’s house--the doer of a good and charitable deed. I
have always, I hope, valued the station to which it has pleased God
to call me, because it especially offers me the privilege of being the
friend of all my fellow-christians, whether richer or poorer, higher or
lower in worldly rank, than am myself.”

Mrs. Peckover’s eyes began to fill. She could have worshipped Doctor
Joyce at that moment.

“Mr. Blyth!” exclaimed Mrs. Joyce, sharply, before another word could be
spoken--“excuse me, Mr. Blyth; but really--”

Valentine was trying to pour out a glass of sherry for Mrs. Peckover.
His admiration of the doctor’s last speech, and his extreme anxiety to
reassure the clown’s wife, must have interfered with his precision of
eye and hand; for one-half of the wine, as he held the decanter, was
dropping into the glass, and the other half was dribbling into a
little river on the cloth. Mrs. Joyce thought of the walnut-wood table
underneath, and felt half distracted as she spoke. Mrs. Peckover,
delighted to be of some use, forgot her company manners in an instant,
pulled out her red cotton pocket-handkerchief and darted at the spilt
sherry. But the rector was even quicker with his napkin. Mrs. Peckover’s
cheeks turned the color of her handkerchief as she put it back in her
pocket, and sat down again.

“Much obliged--no harm done--much obliged, ma’am,” said Doctor Joyce.
“Now, Valentine, if you don’t leave off apologizing, and sit down
directly in that arm-chair against the wall, I shall take Mrs. Peckover
into my study, and hear everything she has to say, at a private
interview. There! we are all comfortable and composed again at last, and
ready to be told how little Mary and the good friend who has been like a
mother to her first met.”

Thus appealed to, Mrs. Peckover began her narrative; sometimes
addressing it to the Doctor, sometimes to Mrs. Joyce, and sometimes
to Valentine. From beginning to end, she was only interrupted at rare
intervals by a word of encouragement, or sympathy, or surprise, from her
audience. Even Mr. Blyth sat most uncharacteristically still and silent;
his expression alone showing the varying influences of the story on him,
from its strange commencement to its melancholy close.


“It’s better than ten years ago, sir,” began the clown’s wife, speaking
first to Doctor Joyce, “since my little Tommy was born; he being now,
if you please, at school and costing nothing, through a presentation, as
they call it I think, which was given us by a kind patron to my husband.
Some time after I had got well over my confinement, I was out one
afternoon taking a walk with baby and Jemmy; which last is my husband,
ma’am. We were at Bangbury, then, just putting up the circus: it was a
fine large neighborhood, and we hoped to do good business there. Jemmy
and me and the baby went out into the fields, and enjoyed ourselves very
much; it being such nice warm spring weather, though it was March at the
time. We came back to Bangbury by the road; and just as we got near the
town, we see a young woman sitting on the bank, and holding her baby in
her arms, just as I had got my baby in mine.

“‘How dreadful ill and weak she do look, don’t she?’ says Jemmy. Before
I could say as much as ‘Yes,’ she stares up at us, and asks in a wild
voice, though it wasn’t very loud either, if we can tell her the way to
Bangbury workhouse. Having pretty sharp eyes of our own, we both of us
knew that a workhouse was no fit place for her. Her gown was very dusty,
and one of her boots was burst, and her hair was draggled all over her
face, and her eyes was sunk in her head, like; but we saw somehow that
she was a lady--or, if she wasn’t exactly a lady, that no workhouse was
proper for her, at any rate. I stooped down to speak to her; but her
baby was crying so dreadful she could hardly hear me. ‘Is the poor thing
ill?’ says I. ‘Starving,’ says she, in such a desperate, fierce way,
that it gave me a turn. ‘Is that your child?’ says I, a bit frightened
about how she’d answer me. ‘Yes,’ she says in quite a new voice, very
soft and sorrowful, and bending her face away from me over the child.
‘Then why don’t you suckle it?’ says I. She looks up at me, and then at
Jemmy and shakes her head, and says nothing. I give my baby to Jemmy
to hold, and went and sat down by her. He walked away a little; and I
whispered to her again, ‘Why don’t you suckle it?’ and she whispered to
me, ‘My milk’s all dried up. I couldn’t wait to hear no more till I’d
got her baby at my own breast.

“That was the first time I suckled little Mary, ma’am. She wasn’t
a month old then, and oh, so weak and small! such a mite of a baby
compared to mine!

“You may be sure, sir, that I asked the young woman lots of questions,
while I was sitting side by side with her. She stared at me with a dazed
look in her face, seemingly quite stupefied by weariness or grief,
or both together. Sometimes she give me an answer and sometimes she
wouldn’t. She was very secret. She wouldn’t say where she come from, or
who her friends were, or what her name was. She said she should never
have name or home or friends again. I just quietly stole a look down at
her left hand, and saw that there was no wedding-ring on her finger, and
guessed what she meant. ‘Does the father know you are wandering about in
this way?’ says I. She flushes up directly; ‘No;’ says she, ‘he doesn’t
know where I am. He never had any love for me, and he has no pity for
me now. God’s curse on him wherever he goes!’--‘Oh, hush! hush!’ says
I, ‘don’t talk like that!’ ‘Why do you ask me questions?’ says she more
fiercely than ever. ‘What business have you to ask me questions that
make me mad?’ ‘I’ve only got one more to bother you with,’ says I, quite
cool; ‘and that is, haven’t you got any money at all with you?’ You see,
ma’am, now I’d got her child at my own bosom, I didn’t care for what she
said, or fear for what she might do to me. The poor mite of a baby was
sure to be a peacemaker between us, sooner or later.

“It turned out she’d got sixpence and a few half-pence--not a farthing
more, and too proud to ask help from any one of her friends. I
managed to worm out of her that she had run away from home before her
confinement, and had gone to some strange place to be confined, where
they’d ill-treated and robbed her. She hadn’t long got away from the
wretches who’d done it. By the time I’d found out all this, her baby
was quite quiet, and ready to go to sleep. I gave it her back. She said
nothing, but took and kissed my hand, her lips feeling like burning
coals on my flesh. ‘You’re kindly welcome,’ says I, a little flustered
at such a queer way of thanking me. ‘Just wait a bit while I speak to my
husband.’ Though she’d been and done wrong, I couldn’t for the life
of me help pitying her, for her fierce ways. She was so young, and so
forlorn and ill, and had such a beautiful face (little Mary’s is the
image of it, ‘specially about the eyes), and seemed so like a lady,
that it was almost a sin, as I thought, to send her to such a place as a
workhouse.

“Well: I went and told Jemmy all I had got out of her--my own baby
kicking and crowing in my arms again, as happy as a king, all the time I
was speaking. ‘It seems shocking,’ says I, ‘to let such as her go into a
workhouse. What had we better do?’--Says Jemmy, ‘Let’s take her with us
to the circus and ask Peggy Burke.’

“Peggy Burke, if you please, sir, was the finest rider that ever stepped
on a horse’s back. We’ve had nothing in our circus to come near her,
since she went to Astley’s. She was the wildest devil of an Irish
girl--oh! I humbly beg your pardon, sir, for saying such a word; but she
really _was_ so wild, I hope you’ll excuse it. She’d go through fire
and water, as they say, to serve people she liked; but as for them she
didn’t, she’d often use her riding-whip among ‘em as free as her tongue.
That cowardly brute Jubber would never have beaten my little Mary, if
Peggy had been with us still! He was so frightened of her that she could
twist him round her finger; and she did, for he dursn’t quarrel with the
best rider in England, and let other circuses get hold of her. Peggy was
a wonderful sharp girl besides, and was always fond of me, and took
my part; so when Jemmy said he thought it best to ask her what we had
better do, you may be sure that I thought it best too. We took the young
woman and the baby with us to the circus at once. She never asked any
questions; she didn’t seem to care where she went, or what she did; she
was dazed and desperate--a sight, Ma’am, to make your heart ache.

“They were just getting tea in the circus, which was nearly finished.
We mostly have tea and dinner there, sir; finding it come cheaper in the
end to mess together when we can. Peggy Burke, I remember, was walking
about on the grass outside, whistling (that was one of her queer ways)
‘The girl I left behind me.’ ‘Ah! Peck,’ says she, ‘what have you been
after now? Who’s the company lady ye’ve brought to tea with us?’ I told
her, sir, all I have told you; while Jemmy set the young woman down on
one of our trunks, and got her a cup of tea. ‘It seems dreadful,’ says
I when I’d done, ‘to send such as her to the workhouse, don’t it?’
‘Workhouse!’ says Peggy, firing up directly; ‘I only wish we could
catch the man who’s got her in that scrape, and put him in there on
water-gruel for the rest of his life. I’d give a shillin’ a wheal out of
my own pocket for the blessed privilege of scoring the thief’s face with
my whip, till his own mother wouldn’t know him!’ And then she went on,
sir, abusing all the men in her Irish way, which I can’t repeat. At last
she stops, and claps me on the back. ‘You’re a darlin’ old girl, Peck!’
says she, ‘and your friends are my friends. Stop where you are, and let
me speak a word to the young woman on the trunk.’

“After a little while she comes back, and says, ‘I’ve done it,
Peck! She’s mighty close, and as proud as Lucifer; but she’s only a
dressmaker, for all that.’ ‘A dressmaker!’ says I; ‘how did you find
out she was a dressmaker?’ ‘Why, I looked at her forefinger, in course,’
says Peggy, ‘and saw the pricks of the needle on it, and soon made her
talk a bit after that. She knows fancy-work and cuttin’ out--would ye
ever have thought it? And I’ll show her how to give the workhouse the
go-by to-morrow, if she only holds out, and keeps in her senses. Stop
where you are, Peck! I’m going to make Jubber put his dirty hand into
his pocket and pull out some money; and that’s a sight worth stoppin’ to
see any day in the week.’

“I waited as she told me; and she called for Jubber, just as if he’d
been her servant; and he come out of the circus. ‘I want ten shillings
advance of wages for that lady on the trunk,’ says Peggy. He laughed at
her. ‘Show your ugly teeth at me again,’ says she, ‘and I’ll box your
ears. I’ve my light hand for a horse’s mouth, and my heavy hand for
a man’s cheek; you ought to know that by this time! Pull out the ten
shillings.’ ‘What for?’ said he, frowning at her. ‘Just this,’ says she.
‘I mean to leave your circus, unless I get those six character dresses
you promised me; and the lady there can do them up beautiful. Pull
out the ten shillings! for I’ve made up my mind to appear before the
Bangbury public on Garryowen’s back, as six women at once.’

“What she meant by this, sir, was, that she was to have six different
dresses on, one over another; and was to go galloping round the ring on
Garryowen (which was a horse), beginning, I think it was, as Empress of
Roossia; and then throwing off the top dress without the horse stopping,
and showing next as some famous Frenchwoman, in the dress underneath;
and keeping on so with different nations, till she got down to the last
dress, which was to be Britannia and the Union-Jack. We’d got bits
of remnants, and old dresses and things to make and alter, but hadn’t
anybody clever enough at cutting out, and what they call ‘Costoom,’ to
do what Peggy wanted--Jubber being too stingy to pay the regular people
who understand such things. The young woman, knowing as she did about
fancy work, was just what was wanted, if she could only get well enough
to use her needle. ‘I’ll see she works the money out,’ says Peggy; ‘but
she’s dead beat to-night, and must have her rest and bit o’ supper,
before she begins to-morrow.’ Jubber wanted to give less than ten
shillings; but between threatening, and saying it should buy twenty
shillings’ worth of tailor’s work, she got the better of him. And he
gave the money, sulky enough.

“‘Now,’ says Peggy, ‘you take her away, and get her a lodging in the
place where you’re staying; and I’ll come tomorrow with some of the
things to make up.’ But, ah dear me! sir, she was never to work as much
as sixpence of that ten shillings out. She was took bad in the night,
and got so much worse in the morning that we had to send for the doctor.

“As soon as he’d seen her, he takes me into the passage, and says he to
me, ‘Do you know who her friends are?’ ‘No, sir,’ says I; ‘I can’t get
her to tell me. I only met her by accident yesterday.’ ‘Try and find
out again,’ says he; ‘for I’m afraid she won’t live over the night. I’ll
come back in the evening and see if there is any change.’

“Peggy and me went into her room together; but we couldn’t even get her
to speak to us for ever so long a time. All at once she cries out, ‘I
can’t see things as I ought. Where’s the woman who suckled my baby when
I was alone by the roadside?’ ‘Here,’ says I--‘here; I’ve got hold
of your hand. Do tell us where we can write to about you.’ ‘Will you
promise to take care of my baby, and not let it go into the workhouse?’
says she. ‘Yes, I promise,’ says I; ‘I do indeed promise with my whole
heart.’ ‘We’ll all take care of the baby,’ says Peggy; ‘only you try
and cheer up, and you’ll get well enough to see me on Garryowen’s back,
before we leave Bangbury--you will for certain, if you cheer up a bit.’
‘I give my baby,’ she says, clutching tight at my hand, ‘to the woman
who suckled it by the roadside; and I pray God to bless _her_ and
forgive _me,_ for Jesus Christ’s sake.’ After that, she lay quiet for
a minute or two. Then she says faintly, ‘Its name’s to be Mary. Put it
into bed to me again; I should like to touch its cheek, and feel how
soft and warm it is once more.’ And I took the baby out of its crib, and
lifted it, asleep as it was, into the bed by her side, and guided her
hand up to its cheek. I saw her lips move a little, and bent down over
her. ‘Give me one kiss,’ she whispered, ‘before I die.’ And I kissed
her, and tried to stop crying as I did it. Then I says to Peggy, ‘You
wait here while I run and fetch the doctor back; for I’m afraid she’s
going fast.’ He wasn’t at home when I got to his house. I did’n’t know
what to do next, when I see a gentleman in the street who looked like a
clergyman, and I asked him if he was one; and he said ‘Yes;’ and he
went back with me. I heard a low wailing and crying in the room, and
saw Peggy sitting on the bundle of dresses she’d brought in the morning,
rocking herself backwards and forwards as Irish people always do when
they’re crying. I went to the bed, and looked through the curtains. The
baby was still sleeping as pretty as ever, and its mother’s hand was
touching one of its arms. I was just going to speak to her again, when
the clergyman said ‘Hush,’ and took a bit of looking-glass that was set
up on the chimney-piece, and held it over her lips. She was gone. Her
poor white wasted hand lay dead on the living baby’s arm.

“I answered all the clergyman’s questions quite straightforward, telling
him everything I knew from beginning to end. When I’d done, Peggy starts
up from the bundle and says, ‘Mind, sir, whatever you do, the child’s
not to be took away from this person here, and sent to the workhouse.
The mother give it to her on that very bed, and I’m a witness of it.’
‘And I promised to be a mother to the baby, sir,’ says I. He turns round
to me, and praises me for what I done, and says nobody shall take it
away from me, unless them as can show their right comes forward to claim
it. ‘But now,’ says he, ‘we must think of other things. We must try
and find out something about this poor woman who has died in such a
melancholy way.’

“It was easier to say that than to do it. The poor thing had nothing
with her but a change of linen for herself and the child, and that
gave us no clue. Then we searched her pocket. There was a cambric
handkerchief in it, marked ‘M. G.;’ and some bits of rusks to sop for
the child; and the sixpence and halfpence which she had when I met her;
and beneath all, in a corner, as if it had been forgotten there, a small
hair bracelet. It was made of two kinds of hair--very little of one
kind, and a good deal of the other. And on the flat clasp of the
bracelet there was cut in tiny letters, _‘In memory of S. G.’_ I
remember all this, sir, for I’ve often and often looked at the bracelet
since that time.

“We found nothing more--no letters, or cards, or anything. The clergyman
said that the ‘M. G.’ on the handkerchief must be the initials of
her name; and the ‘S. G.’ on the bracelet must mean, he thought, some
relation whose hair she wore as a sort of keepsake. I remember Peggy and
me wondering which was S. G.’s hair; and who the other person might be,
whose hair was wove into the bracelet. But the clergyman he soon cut us
short by asking for pen, ink, and paper directly. ‘I’m going to write
out an advertisement,’ says he, ‘saying how you met with the young
woman, and what she was like, and how she was dressed.’ ‘Do you mean to
say anything about the baby, sir?’ says I. ‘Certainly,’ says he; ‘it’s
only right, if we get at her friends by advertising, to give them the
chance of doing something for the child. And if they live anywhere in
county, I believe we shall find them out; for the _Bangbury Chronicle,_
into which I mean to put the advertisement, goes everywhere in our part
of England.’

“So he sits down, and writes what he said he would, and takes it away to
be printed in the next day’s number of the newspaper. ‘If nothing
comes of this,’ says he, ‘I think I can manage about the burial with a
charitable society here. I’ll take care and inform you the moment the
advertisement’s answered.’ I hardly know how it was, sir; but I almost
hoped they wouldn’t answer it. Having suckled the baby myself, and
kissed its mother before she died, I couldn’t make up my mind to the
chance of its being took away from me just then. I ought to have thought
how poor we were, and how hard it would be for us to bring the child up.
But, somehow, I never did think of that--no more did Peggy--no more did
Jemmy; not even when we put the baby to bed that night along with our
own.

“Well, sir, sure enough, two days after the advertisement come out, it
was answered in the cruelest letter I ever set eyes on. The clergyman he
come to me with it. ‘It was left this evening,’ says he, ‘by a strange
messenger, who went away directly. I told my servant to follow him; but
it was too late--he was out of sight.’ The letter was very short, and
we thought it was in a woman’s handwriting--a feigned handwriting, the
clergyman said. There was no name signed, and no date at top or bottom.
Inside it there was a ten-pound bank-note; and the person as sent it
wrote that it was enclosed to bury the young woman decently. ‘She was
better dead than alive’--the letter went on--‘after having disgraced her
father and her relations. As for the child, it was the child of sin,
and had no claim on people who desired to preserve all that was left of
their good name, and to set a moral example to others. The parish must
support it if nobody else would. It would be useless to attempt to trace
them, or to advertise again. The baby’s father had disappeared, they
didn’t know where; and they could hold no communication now with such a
monster of wickedness, even if he was found. She was dead in her shame
and her sin; and her name should never be mentioned among them she
belonged to henceforth for ever.’

“This was what I remember in the letter, sir. A shocking and unchristian
letter I said; and the clergyman he said so too.

“She was buried in the poor corner of the churchyard. They marked out
the place, in case anybody should ever want to see it, by cutting the
two letters M. G., and the date of when she died, upon a board of wood
at the head of the grave. The clergyman then give me the hair bracelet
and the handkerchief, and said, ‘You keep these as careful as you keep
the child; for they may be of great importance one of these days. I
shall seal up the letter (which is addressed to me) and put it in
my strong box.’ He’d asked me, before this, if I’d thought of what a
responsibility it was for such as me to provide for the baby. And I
told him I’d promised, and would keep my promise, and trust to God’s
providence for the rest. The clergyman was a very kind gentleman, and
got up a subscription for the poor babe; and Peggy Burke, when she had
her benefit before the circus left Bangbury, give half of what she got
as her subscription. I never heard nothing about the child’s friends
from that time to this; and I know no more who its father is now than I
did then. And glad I am that he’s never come forward--though, perhaps,
I oughtn’t to say so. I keep the hair bracelet and the handkerchief as
careful as the clergyman told me, for the mother’s sake as well as the
child’s. I’ve known some sorrow with her since I took her as my own; but
I love her only the dearer for it, and still think the day a happy day
for both of us, when I first stopped and suckled her by the road-side.

“This is all I have to say, if you please, sir, about how I first met
with little Mary; and I wish I could have told it in a way that was more
fit for such as you to hear.”




CHAPTER V. MADONNA’S MISFORTUNE.

As the clown’s wife ended her narrative, but little was said in the way
of comment on it by those who had listened to her. They were too much
affected by what they had heard to speak, as yet, except briefly and
in low voices. Mrs. Joyce more than once raised her handkerchief to her
eyes. Her husband murmured some cordial words of sympathy and thanks--in
an unusually subdued manner, however. Valentine said nothing; but he
drew his chair close to Mrs. Peckover, and turning his face away as if
he did not wish it to be seen, took her hand in one of his and patted it
gently with the other. There was now perfect silence in the room for a
few minutes. Then they all looked out with one accord, and as it seemed
with one feeling, towards the garden.

In a shady place, just visible among the trees, the rector’s daughters,
and little Mary, and the great Newfoundland dog were all sitting
together on the grass. The two young ladies appeared to be fastening
a garland of flowers round the child’s neck, while she was playfully
offering a nosegay for Leo to smell at. The sight was homely and simple
enough; but it was full of the tenderest interest--after the narrative
which had just engaged them--to those who now witnessed it. They looked
out on the garden scene silently for some little time. Mrs. Joyce was
the first to speak again.

“Would it be asking too much of you, Mrs. Peckover,” said she, “to
inquire how the poor little thing really met with the accident that
caused her misfortune? I know there is an account of it in the bills of
the circus but--”

“It’s the most infamous thing I ever read!” interrupted Mr. Blyth
indignantly. “The man who wrote it ought to be put in the pillory.
I never remember wanting to throw a rotten egg at any of my
fellow-creatures before; but I feel certain that I should enjoy having a
shy at Mr. Jubber!”

“Gently, Valentine--gently,” interposed the rector. “I think, my love,”
 he continued, turning to Mrs. Joyce, “that it is hardly considerate to
Mrs. Peckover to expect her to comply with your request. She has already
sacrificed herself once to our curiosity; and, really, to ask her now
to recur a second time to recollections which I am sure must distress
her--”

“It’s worse than distressing, indeed, sir, even to think of that
dreadful accident,” said Mrs. Peckover, “and specially as I can’t help
taking some blame to myself for it. But if the lady wishes to know how
it happened, I’m sure I’m agreeable to tell her. People in our way of
life, ma’am--as I’ve often heard Peggy Burke say--are obliged to dry
the tear at their eyes long before it’s gone from their hearts. But pray
don’t think, sir, I mean that now about myself and in your company. If I
_do_ feel low at talking of little Mary’s misfortune, I can take a look
out into the garden there, and see how happy she is--and that’s safe to
set me right again.”

“I ought to tell you first, sir,” proceeded the clown’s wife, after
waiting thoughtfully for a moment or two before she spoke again, “that I
got on much better with little Mary than ever I thought I should for the
first six years of her life. She grew up so pretty that gentlefolks was
always noticing her, and asking about her; and nearly in every place the
circus went to they made her presents, which helped nicely in her keep
and clothing. And our own people, too, petted her and were fond of her.
All those six years we got on as pleasantly as could be. It was not till
she was near her seventh birthday that I was wicked and foolish enough
to consent to her being shown in the performances.

“I was sorely tried and tempted before I did consent. Jubber first
said he wanted her to perform with the riders; and I said ‘No’ at once,
though I was awful frightened of him in those days. But soon after,
Jemmy (who wasn’t the clown then that he is now, sir; there was others
to be got for his money, to do what he did at that time)--Jemmy comes to
me, saying he’s afraid he shall lose his place, if I don’t give in about
Mary. This staggered me a good deal; for I don’t know what we should
have done then, if my husband had lost his engagement. And, besides,
there was the poor dear child herself, who was mad to be carried up in
the air on horseback, always begging and praying to be made a little
rider of. And all the rest of ‘em in the circus worried and laughed
at me; and, in short, I give in at last against my conscience, but I
couldn’t help it.

“I made a bargain, though, that she should only be trusted to the
steadiest, soberest man, and the best rider of the whole lot. They
called him ‘Muley’ in the bills, and stained his face to make him look
like a Turk, or something of that sort; but his real name was Francis
Yapp, and a very good fatherly sort of man he was in his way, having
a family of his own to look after. He used to ride splendid, at full
straddle, with three horses under him--one foot, you know, sir, being on
the outer horse’s back, and one foot on the inner. Him and Jubber made
it out together that he was to act a wild man, flying for his life
across some desert, with his only child, and poor little Mary was to
be the child. They darkened her face to look like his; and put an
outlandish kind of white dress on her; and buckled a red belt round her
waist, with a sort of handle in it for Yapp to hold her by. After first
making believe in all sorts of ways, that him and the child was in
danger of being taken and shot, he had to make believe afterwards that
they had escaped; and to hold her up, in a sort of triumph, at the full
stretch of his arm--galloping round and round the ring all the while. He
was a tremendous strong man, and could do it as easy as I could hold up
a bit of that plum cake.

“Poor little love! she soon got over the first fright of the thing,
and had a sort of mad fondness for it that I never liked to see, for it
wasn’t natural to her. Yapp, he said, she’d got the heart of a lion, and
would grow up the finest woman-rider in the world. I was very unhappy
about it, and lived a miserable life, always fearing some accident. But
for some time nothing near an accident happened; and lots of money come
into the circus to see Yapp and little Mary--but that was Jubber’s luck
and not ours. One night--when she was a little better than seven year
old--

“Oh, ma’am, how I ever lived over that dreadful night I don’t know! I
was a sinful, miserable wretch not to have starved sooner than let the
child go into danger; but I was so sorely tempted and driven to it, God
knows!--No, sir! no, ma’am; and many thanks for your kindness, I’ll go
on now I’ve begun. Don’t mind me crying; I’ll manage to tell it somehow.
The strap--no, I mean the handle; the handle in the strap gave way
all of a sudden--just at the last too! just at the worst time, when he
couldn’t catch her--!

“Never--oh, never, never, to my dying day shall I forget the horrible
screech that went up from the whole audience; and the sight of the white
thing lying huddled dead-still on the boards! We hadn’t such a number in
as usual that night; and she fell on an empty place between the benches.
I got knocked down by the horses in running to her--I was clean out
of my senses, and didn’t know where I was going--Yapp had fallen among
them, and hurt himself badly, trying to catch her--they were running
wild in the ring--the horses was--frantic-like with the noise all round
them. I got up somehow, and a crowd of people jostled me, and I saw my
innocent darling carried among them. I felt hands on me, trying to pull
me back; but I broke away, and got into the waiting-room along with the
rest.

“There she was--my own, own little Mary, that I’d promised her poor
mother to take care of--there she was, lying all white and still on
an old box, with my cloak rolled up as a pillow for her. And people
crowding round her. And a doctor feeling her head all over. And Yapp
among them, held up by two men, with his face all over blood. I wasn’t
able to speak or move; I didn’t feel as if I was breathing even, till
the doctor stopped, and looked up; and then a great shudder went through
all of us together, as if we’d been one body, instead of twenty or more.

“‘It’s not killed her,’ says the doctor. ‘Her brain’s escaped injury.’

“I didn’t hear another word.

“I don’t know how long it was before I seemed to wake up like, with a
dreadful feeling of pain and tearing of everything inside me. I was
on the landlady’s bed, and Jemmy was standing over me with a bottle
of salts. ‘They’ve put her to bed,’ he says to me, ‘and the doctor’s
setting her arm.’ I didn’t recollect at first; but when I did, it was
almost as bad as seeing the dreadful accident all over again.

“It was some time before any of us found out what had really happened.
The breaking of her arm, the doctor said, had saved her head; which was
only cut and bruised a little, not half as bad as was feared. Day after
day, and night after night, I sat by her bedside, comforting her through
her fever, and the pain of the splints on her arm, and never once
suspecting--no more, I believe, than she did--the awful misfortune that
had really happened. She was always wonderful quiet and silent for
a child, poor lamb, in little illnesses that she’d had before; and
somehow, I didn’t wonder--at least, at first--why she never said a word,
and never answered me when I spoke to her.

“This went on, though, after she got better in her health; and a
strange look came over her eyes. They seemed to be always wondering and
frightened, in a confused way, about something or other. She took, too,
to rolling her head about restlessly from one side of the pillow to the
other; making a sort of muttering and humming now and then, but still
never seeming to notice or to care for anything I said to her. One day,
I was warming her a nice cup of beef-tea over the fire, when I heard,
quite sudden and quite plain, these words from where she lay on the bed,
‘Why are you always so quiet here? Why doesn’t somebody speak to me?’

“I knew there wasn’t another soul in the room but the poor child at that
time; and yet, the voice as spoke those words was no more like little
Mary’s voice, than my voice, sir, is like yours. It sounded, somehow,
hoarse and low, and deep and faint, all at the same time; the strangest,
shockingest voice to come from a child, who always used to speak so
clearly and prettily before, that ever I heard. If I was only cleverer
with my words, ma’am, and could tell you about it properly--but I
can’t. I only know it gave me such a turn to hear her, that I upset the
beef-tea, and ran back in a fright to the bed. ‘Why, Mary! Mary!’ says
I, quite loud, ‘are you so well already that you’re trying to imitate
Mr. Jubber’s gruff voice?’

“There was the same wondering look in her eyes--only wilder than I had
ever seen it yet--while I was speaking. When I’d done, she says in the
same strange way, ‘Speak out, mother; I can’t hear you when you whisper
like that.’ She was as long saying these words, and bungled over them as
much, as if she was only just learning to speak. I think I got the first
suspicion then, of what had really happened. ‘Mary!’ I bawled out as
loud as I could, ‘Mary! can’t you hear me?’ She shook her head, and
stared up at me with the frightened, bewildered look again: then seemed
to get pettish and impatient all of a sudden--the first time I ever saw
her so--and hid her face from me on the pillow.

“Just then the doctor come in. ‘Oh, sir!’ says I, whispering to
him--just as if I hadn’t found out a minute ago that she couldn’t hear
me at the top of my voice--‘I’m afraid there’s something gone wrong with
her hearing--.’ ‘Have you only just now suspected that?’ says he; ‘I’ve
been afraid of it for some days past, but I thought it best to say
nothing till I’d tried her; and she’s hardly well enough yet, poor
child, to be worried with experiments on her ears.’ ‘She’s much better,’
says I; ‘indeed, she’s much better to-day, sir! Oh, do try her now, for
it’s so dreadful to be in doubt a moment longer than we can help.’

“He went up to the bedside, and I followed him. She was lying with her
face hidden away from us on the pillow, just as it was when I left her.
The doctor says to me, ‘Don’t disturb her, don’t let her look round, so
that she can see us--I’m going to call to her.’ And he called ‘Mary’ out
loud, twice; and she never moved. The third time he tried her, it was
with such a shout at the top of his voice, that the landlady come up,
thinking something had happened. I was looking over his shoulder, and
saw that my dear child never started in the least. ‘Poor little thing,’
says the doctor, quite sorrowful, ‘this is worse than I expected.’ He
stooped down and touched her, as he said this; and she turned round
directly, and put out her hand to have her pulse felt as usual. I tried
to get out of her sight, for I was crying, and didn’t wish her to see
it; but she was too sharp for me. She looked hard in my face and the
landlady’s, then in the doctor’s, which was downcast enough; for he had
got very fond of her, just as everybody else did who saw much of little
Mary.

“‘What’s the matter?’ she says, in the same sort of strange unnatural
voice again. We tried to pacify her, but only made her worse. ‘Why do
you keep on whispering?’ she asks. ‘Why don’t you speak out loud, so
that I can--,’ and then she stopped, seemingly in a sort of helpless
fright and bewilderment. She tried to get up in bed, and her face turned
red all over. ‘Can she read writing?’ says the doctor. ‘Oh, yes, sir,
says I; ‘she can read and write beautiful for a child of her age; my
husband taught her.’ ‘Get me paper and pen and ink directly,’ says he
to the landlady; who went at once and got him what he wanted. ‘We must
quiet her at all hazards,’ says the doctor, ‘or she’ll excite herself
into another attack of fever. She feels what’s the matter with her, but
don’t understand it; and I’m going to tell her by means of this paper.
It’s a risk,’ he says, writing down on the paper in large letters, _You
Are Deaf;_ ‘but I must try all I can do for her ears immediately; and
this will prepare her,’ says he, going to the bed, and holding the paper
before her eyes.

“She shrank back on the pillow, as still as death, the instant she saw
it; but didn’t cry, and looked more puzzled and astonished, I should
say, than distressed. But she was breathing dreadful quick--I felt that,
as I stooped down and kissed her. ‘She’s too young,’ says the doctor,
‘to know what the extent of her calamity really is. You stop here and
keep her quiet till I come back, for I trust the case is not hopeless
yet.’ ‘But whatever has made her deaf, sir?’ says the landlady, opening
the door for him. ‘The shock of that fall in the circus,’ says he, going
out in a very great hurry. I thought I should never have held up my head
again, as I heard them words, looking at little Mary, with my arm round
her neck all the time.

“Well, sir, the doctor come back; and he syringed her ears first--and
that did no good. Then he tried blistering, and then he put on leeches;
and still it was no use. ‘I’m afraid it is a hopeless case,’ says he;
‘but there’s a doctor who’s had more practice than I’ve had with deaf
people, who comes from where he lives to our Dispensary once a week.
To-morrow’s his day, and I’ll bring him here with me.’

“And he did bring this gentleman, as he promised he would--an old
gentleman, with such a pleasant way of speaking that I understood
everything he said to me directly. ‘I’m afraid you must make up your
mind to the worst,’ says he. ‘I have been hearing about the poor child
from my friend who’s attended her; and I’m sorry to say I don’t think
there’s much hope.’ Then he goes to the bed and looks at her. ‘Ah,’ says
he, ‘there’s just the same expression in her face that I remember seeing
in a mason’s boy--a patient of mine--who fell off a ladder, and lost his
hearing altogether by the shock. You don’t hear what I’m saying, do you,
my dear?’ says he in a hearty cheerful way. ‘You don’t hear me saying
that you’re the prettiest little girl I ever saw in my life?’ She looked
up at him confused, and quite silent. He didn’t speak to her again, but
told me to turn her on the bed, so that he could get at one of her ears.

“He pulled out some instruments, while I did what he asked, and put them
into her ear, but so tenderly that he never hurt her. Then he looked in,
through a sort of queer spy-glass thing. Then he did it all over again
with the other ear; and then he laid down the instruments and pulled
out his watch. ‘Write on a piece of paper,’ says he to the other doctor:
_‘Do you know that the watch is ticking?’_ When this was done, he makes
signs to little Mary to open her mouth, and puts as much of his watch in
as would go between her teeth, while the other doctor holds up the paper
before her. When he took the watch out again, she shook her head, and
said ‘No,’ just in the same strange voice as ever. The old gentleman
didn’t speak a word as he put the watch back in his fob; but I saw by
his face that he thought it was all over with her hearing, after what
had just happened.

“‘Oh, try and do something for her, sir!’ says I. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,
don’t give her up, sir!’ ‘My good soul,’ says he, ‘you must set her an
example of cheerfulness, and keep up her spirits--that’s all that can be
done for her now.’ ‘Not _all,_ sir,’ says I, ‘surely not _all!’_ ‘Indeed
it is,’ says he; ‘her hearing is completely gone; the experiment with my
watch proves it. I had an exactly similar case with the mason’s boy,’
he says, turning to the other doctor. ‘The shock of that fall has,
I believe, paralyzed the auditory nerve in her, as it did in him.’ I
remember those words exactly, sir, though I didn’t quite understand them
at the time. But he explained himself to me very kindly; telling me over
again, in a plain way, what he’d just told the doctor. He reminded me,
too, that the remedies which had been already tried had been of no use;
and told me I might feel sure that any others would only end in the same
way, and put her to useless pain into the bargain. ‘I hope,’ says he,
‘the poor child is too young to suffer much mental misery under her
dreadful misfortune. Keep her amused, and keep her talking, if you
possibly can--though I doubt very much whether, in a little time, you
won’t fail completely in getting her to speak at all.’

“‘Don’t say that, sir,’ says I; ‘don’t say she’ll be dumb as well as
deaf; it’s enough to break one’s heart only to think of it.’ ‘But I
_must_ say so,’ says he; ‘for I’m afraid it’s the truth.’ And then
he asks me whether I hadn’t noticed already that she was unwilling to
speak; and that, when she did speak, her voice wasn’t the same voice it
used to be. I said ‘Yes,’ to that; and asked him whether the fall had
had anything to do with it. He said, taking me up very short, it had
everything to do with it, because the fall had made her, what they call,
stone deaf, which prevented her from hearing the sound of her own voice.
So it was changed, he told me, because she had no ear now to guide
herself by in speaking, and couldn’t know in the least whether the few
words she said were spoken soft or loud, or deep or clear. ‘So far as
the poor child herself is concerned,’ says he, ‘she might as well be
without a voice at all; for she has nothing but her memory left to tell
her that she has one.’

“I burst out a-crying as he said this; for somehow I’d never thought of
anything so dreadful before. ‘I’ve been a little too sudden in telling
you the worst, haven’t I?’ says the old gentleman kindly; ‘but you
must be taught how to make up your mind to meet the full extent of this
misfortune for the sake of the child, whose future comfort and happiness
depend greatly on you.’ And then he bid me keep up her reading and
writing, and force her to use her voice as much as I could, by every
means in my power. He told me I should find her grow more and more
unwilling to speak every day, just for the shocking reason that she
couldn’t hear a single word she said, or a single tone of her own voice.
He warned me that she was already losing the wish and the want to speak;
and that it would very soon be little short of absolute pain to her to
be made to say even a few words; but he begged and prayed me not to let
my good nature get the better of my prudence on that account, and not
to humor her, however I might feel tempted to do so--for if I did, she
would be dumb as well as deaf most certainly. He told me my own common
sense would show me the reason why; but I suppose I was too distressed
or too stupid to understand things as I ought. He had to explain it
to me in so many words, that if she wasn’t constantly exercised in
speaking, she would lose her power of speech altogether, for want of
practice--just the same as if she’d been born dumb. ‘So, once again,’
says he, ‘mind you make her use her voice. Don’t give her her dinner,
unless she asks for it. Treat her severely in that way, poor little
soul, because it’s for her own good.’

“It was all very well for _him_ to say that, but it was impossible
for _me_ to do it. The dear child, ma’am, seemed to get used to her
misfortune, except when we tried to make her speak. It was the saddest,
prettiest sight in the world to see how patiently and bravely she bore
with her hard lot from the first. As she grew better in her health, she
kept up her reading and writing quite cleverly with my husband and me;
and all her nice natural cheerful ways come back to her just the same
as ever. I’ve read or heard somewhere, sir, about God’s goodness in
tempering the wind to the shorn lamb. I don’t know who said that first;
but it might well have been spoken on account of my own darling little
Mary, in those days. Instead of us being the first to comfort her,
it was she that was first to comfort us. And so she’s gone on ever
since--bless her heart! Only treat her kindly, and, in spite of her
misfortune, she’s the merriest, happiest little thing--the easiest
pleased and amused, I do believe, that ever lived.

“If we were wrong in not forcing her to speak more than we did, I must
say this much for me and my husband, that we hadn’t the heart to make
her miserable and keep on tormenting her from morning to night, when
she was always happy and comfortable if we would only let her alone. We
tried our best for some time to do what the gentleman told us; but it’s
so hard--as you’ve found I dare say, ma’am--not to end by humoring them
you love! I never see the tear in her eye, except when we forced her to
speak to us; and then she always cried, and was fretful and out of sorts
for the whole day. It seemed such a dreadful difficulty and pain to her
to say only two or three words; and the shocking husky moaning voice
that sounded somehow as if it didn’t belong to her, never changed. My
husband first gave up worrying her to speak. He practiced her with her
book and writing, but let her have her own will in everything else; and
he teached her all sorts of tricks on the cards, for amusement, which
was a good way of keeping her going with her reading and her pen
pleasantly, by reason, of course, of him and her being obliged to put
down everything they had to say to each other on a little slate that we
bought for her after she got well.

“It was Mary’s own notion, if you please, ma’am, to have the slate
always hanging at her side. Poor dear! she thought it quite a splendid
ornament, and was as proud of it as could be. Jemmy, being neat-handed
at such things, did the frame over for her prettily with red morocco,
and got our propertyman to do it all round with a bright golden
border. And then we hung it at her side, with a nice little bit of silk
cord--just as you see it now.

“I held out in making her speak some time after my husband: but at last
I gave in too. I know it was wrong and selfish of me; but I got a fear
that she wouldn’t like me as well as she used to do, and would take
more kindly to Jemmy than to me, if I went on. Oh, how happy she was
the first day I wrote down on her slate that I wouldn’t worry her about
speaking any more! She jumped up on my knees--being always as nimble as
a squirrel--and kissed me over and over again with all her heart. For
the rest of the day she run about the room, and all over the house,
like a mad thing, and when Jemmy came home at night from performing, she
would get out of bed and romp with him, and ride pickaback on him, and
try and imitate the funny faces she’d seen him make in the ring. I do
believe, sir, that was the first regular happy night we had all had
together since the dreadful time when she met with her accident.

“Long after that, my conscience was uneasy though, at times, about
giving in as I had. At last I got a chance of speaking to another doctor
about little Mary; and he told me that if we had kept her up in her
speaking ever so severely, it would still have been a pain and a
difficulty to her to say her words, to her dying day. He said too, that
he felt sure--though he couldn’t explain it to me--that people afflicted
with such stone deafness as hers didn’t feel the loss of speech, because
they never had the want to use their speech; and that they took to
making signs, and writing, and such like, quite kindly as a sort of
second nature to them. This comforted me, and settled my mind a good
deal. I hope in God what the gentleman said was true; for if I was in
fault in letting her have her own way and be happy, it’s past mending
by this time. For more than two years, ma’am, I’ve never heard her say
a single word, no more than if she’d been born dumb, and it’s my belief
that all the doctors in the world couldn’t make her speak now.

“Perhaps, sir, you might wish to know how she first come to show her
tricks on the cards in the circus. There was no danger in her doing
that, I know--and yet I’d have given almost everything I have, not to
let her be shown about as she is. But I was threatened again, in the
vilest, wickedest way--I hardly know how to tell it, gentlemen, in the
presence of such as you--Jubber, you must know--”


Just as Mrs. Peckover, with very painful hesitation, pronounced the
last words, the hall clock of the Rectory struck two. She heard it, and
stopped instantly.

“Oh, if you please, sir, was that two o’clock?” she asked, starting up
with a look of alarm.

“Yes, Mrs. Peckover,” said the rector; “but really, after having b

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